"The Police Cannot Be Present at Every Transaction": Regulating Marketplace Meetings between Taxi Drivers and Passengers in Asheville, North Carolina, 1914-1922. (March 2020) - Epstein, Seth
This article examines the contentious regulation of taxicabs in Asheville, North Carolina, to explore the strains on and supplements to paternalistic ways of knowing and governing in New South cities in the early twentieth century. Authorities attempted to manage marketplace meetings between drivers and patrons to create predictable and transparent places out of taxis in motion. Regulations governed who could act as driver and as customer, where they could meet, and the rates that the former could charge. However, each of these stages tended to produce spaces that resisted elites' disciplinary aspirations. The regulation of taxis undermined paternalistic ways of governing and knowing the city while facilitating the dispersal of objective knowledge-creating technologies such as taximeters. Commissioners' exercise of power rested on the belief that they could know taxi drivers, while taximeters' exercise of power rested on the belief that they could know the city.