Hackney carriage

A hackney or hackney carriage (also called a cab, black cab, hack or London taxi) is a carriage or car for hire. A hackney of a more expensive or high class was called a remise. A symbol of London and Britain, the black taxi is a common sight on the streets of the UK. The hackney carriages carry a roof sign TAXI that can be illuminated at night to indicate their availability for passengers. In the UK, the name hackney carriage today refers to a taxicab licensed by the Public Carriage Office, local authority (non-metropolitan district councils, unitary authorities) or the Department of the Environment depending on region of the country. In the United States, the police department of the city of Boston has a Hackney Carriage Unit, analogous to taxicab regulators in other cities, that issues Hackney Carriage medallions to its taxi operators. The origins of the word hackney in connection with horses and carriages are uncertain. The origin is often attributed to the London borough of Hackney, whose name likely originated in Old English meaning 'Haka's Island'. There is some doubt whether the word for a horse was derived from this place-name, as the area was historically marshy and not well-suited for keeping horses. The American Hackney Horse Society favours an alternative etymology stemming from the French word haquenée—a horse of medium size recommended for lady riders—which was brought to England with the Norman Conquest and became fully assimilated into the English language by the start of the 14th century. The word became associated with an ambling horse, usually for hire. The place-name, through its famous association with horses and horse-drawn carriages, is also the root of the Spanish word jaca, a term used for a small breed of horse and the Sardinian achetta horse. The first documented hackney coach—the name later extended to the newer and smaller carriages—operated in London in 1621. The New York City colloquial terms "hack" (taxi or taxi-driver), hackstand (taxi stand), and hack license (taxi licence) are probably derived from hackney carriage.

About this result

This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.

Related publications (3)

Related concepts (3)

Inferring Accurate Bus Trajectories from Noisy Estimated Arrival Time Records

Lakmal Buddika Meegahapola

Urban commuting data has long been a vital source of understanding population mobility behaviour and has been widely adopted for various applications such as transport infrastructure planning and urban anomaly detection. While individual-specific transacti ...

IEEE2019

Collaborative Transportation Systems

We propose a new class of applications for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs), called collaborative transportation applications that aim at solving transportation problems such as congestion and parking. Specifically, we define two applications: Sma ...

IEEE2010

Short Term Travel Time Prediction Using Floating Car Data Based On Cluster Analysis

Precise short-term prediction of traffic parameters such as flow and travel-time is a necessary component for many ITS applications. This work describes the research on a novel, fast, and robust algorithm which is based on a partitioning cluster analysis. ...

2008

Taxi

A taxi, also known as a taxicab or simply a cab, is a type of vehicle for hire with a driver, used by a single passenger or small group of passengers, often for a non-shared ride. A taxicab conveys passengers between locations of their choice. This differs from public transport where the pick-up and drop-off locations are decided by the service provider, not by the customers, although demand responsive transport and share taxis provide a hybrid bus/taxi mode.

Public transport

Public transport (also known as public transportation, public transit, mass transit, or simply transit) is a system of transport for passengers by group travel systems available for use by the general public unlike private transport, typically managed on a schedule, operated on established routes, and that charge a posted fee for each trip. There is no rigid definition of which kinds of transport are included, and air travel is often not thought of when discussing public transport—dictionaries use wording like "buses, trains, etc.

New York City

New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is the most densely populated major city in the United States. The city is more than twice as populous as Los Angeles, the nation's second-largest city. New York City is situated at the southern tip of New York State. Situated on one of the world's largest natural harbors, New York City comprises five boroughs, each of which is coextensive with a respective county.