“The Police Cannot Be Present at Every Transaction”: Regulating Marketplace Meetings between Taxi Drivers and Passengers in Asheville,North Carolina,1914-1922

A scathing editorial in the Asheville Citizen on May 25, 1922, criticized the city’s commissioners for allowing taxi drivers to charge “extortionate fares” for their services. The editorial went so far as to speculate that corruption was at the root of the inaction of Public Safety Commissioner R. L. Fitzpatrick, whose campaign banners had previously flown from taxis and who consequently may have been “paying off a political debt with his official O.K. of the gouging.” The economic practices of the drivers were described as illegitimate and criminal, equivalent to the “continuous blackjacking of the public.” This criticism seems harsh, as the editorial’s objection centered on drivers charging the “minimum fare of $1 for one passenger,” an amount set by the city less than two years earlier. The editorial’s grievances included commissioners’ refusal to take up the paper’s previous suggestions that they mandate the use of taximeters, which recorded the distance and calculated the cost of individual rides. A taximeter would, according to the Citizen, provide “the fairest and most practicable method of regulating charges.” ¹ As the editorial’s frustrated tone suggests, this was not the first time that the Citizen had argued for taximeters. As early as 1920, an editorial counseled that the technology would satisfy all interested parties as long as a reasonable schedule of rates was set. ² Resembling progressive reformers who believed large-scale markets to be systems “of power of and coercion,” these editorials likened marketplace meetings between driver and customer to forcible robbery. ³

The Citizen editorials are notable for multiple reasons. They publicly exposed a split in Asheville’s elite. Elites were often tightly knit in Southern cities and often acted on the assumption that, as historian David Goldfield has argued, “the interests of a narrow economic elite defined the interests of the community as a whole.” ⁴ The associate editor of the Citizen in 1922 and future manager of the Citizen-Times Company, D. Hiden Ramsey, embodied this close relationship. He himself had responsibility for regulating taxicabs when he served as the city’s Commissioner of Public Safety between 1915 and 1919. According to historian Richard Starnes, Asheville leaders typically could find common ground in their belief that tourism should serve as the economic foundation of their city. ⁵ Therefore, it was significant that the city’s most prominent and oldest newspaper not only alleged corruption but also specifically criticized the commissioners for their “surprising incapacity for guardianship of a tourist town’s welfare.” ⁶ Amplifying this comment a few days later, the Charlotte Observer cautioned that the mountain city’s reputation would suffer elsewhere in the country if its officials failed to police the motorized “street robbers” there. ⁷

The editorials also highlighted how taxis could be either an asset or a liability to a city like Asheville, which depended on the New South industry of tourism since the railroad’s arrival in 1880. ⁸ Taxis were important for visitors and for the local economy, as visitors mostly arrived via rail until the 1920s. ⁹ The increasing number of taxi drivers reflected this significance. By September 1918, there were 106 taxicabs in Asheville. ¹⁰ One year later, a disgruntled visitor observed that the city’s only occupations were “real estate doctors and taxi drivers.” ¹¹ In 1920, only six years after the city government first passed any regulations pertaining to taxicabs, there were approximately two hundred drivers. ¹² The number of taxis varied with the seasons, swelling in the summer months as drivers from states like Florida traveled to Asheville for its cooler and more popular summers. ¹³ Prominent boosters like the Citizen effectively cast anything that appeared to threaten the city’s tourist economy as a public menace. A 1922 editorial in the Citizen asserted that the city’s future prosperity and development depended on “the service that she can give to those who visit her.” Taxicabs that became the focus of travelers’ complaints would seem to threaten the city’s prosperity. ¹⁴ Drivers’ demographics may also have contributed to local authorities’ identification of taxis as a source of anxiety, as at least several were young and single. ¹⁵ Several factors related to World War I may also have contributed to the perception of taxi service as a problem in need of stringent management in the late 1910s and early 1920s. These considerations included wartime scrutiny of drivers, Prohibition, which had been state law since 1909, and inflationary pressures. ¹⁶

While its importance to tourism likely informed how Asheville officials sought to manage the taxi industry, local authorities around the country were similarly concerned with protecting their locale’s reputation and managing proliferating urban spaces associated with the popular amusements of mass culture. Stationary sites of popular culture such as dance halls and theaters called for several strategies for the production of social knowledge. These included reports about the environment, patrons, and performances. Risqué or disorderly shows were subject to sanctions or closure. In Atlanta, reformers objected to specific parts of the performances and put pressure on venues to change those aspects. ¹⁷ Reformers elsewhere monitored dancers and called for specific dances to be altered or banned. ¹⁸ Private groups in New York took the initiative to clandestinely surveil sites such as saloons to press for greater government oversight. ¹⁹ While new norms of behavior emerged in commercial spaces, officials or volunteers could endeavor to directly observe and evaluate these spaces on a case-by-case basis. There was an ultimate remedy available to cities who felt such spaces were wholly intolerable, as even a tourism-reliant place like Asheville banned public dance halls entirely in the early 1920s. ²⁰

The taxicab has been a colorful accessory in analyses of the strategies of authorities to manage popular culture but has not been adequately explored in its own right. Taxis focus our attention on relations of production in ways that other sites of capitalist mass culture in the early twentieth century do not. While taxis in motion represented reproducible space that was the product of what sociologist Henri Lefebvre termed “repetitive actions,” there was nonetheless manifold variables in drivers’ encounters with passengers. ²¹ Furthermore, unlike stationary sites of popular culture, taxicabs could and did evade direct surveillance. ²² Their nearly boundless mobility worried many observers in the early twentieth century. ²³ Taxis presented in their mobile form a particular problem for policing that had the potential to disrupt the “command over money, command over space, and command over time” that geographer David Harvey has observed define the urban experience. ²⁴

While conflicts over taxicabs have been explored in metropolitan locations like New York, Toronto, Chicago, and Paris, as well as colonial cities like Manila, cities of smaller sizes during this period struggled with the regulation of taxicabs as well. ²⁵ Many locales reacted to what historian Graham Russell Hodges has identified as the characteristics that set motorized taxis apart from previous drivers-for-hire: “the newness of speed, competition, and the advance of a leisure society.” ²⁶ For Nashville, the taximeter provided a simpler solution to organizing fares than a geographical zone system in 1913. ²⁷ In 1920, an organization known as the St. Louis Citizens’ Traffic Committee, composed of members representing different civic associations, noted the city as yet lacked any local regulation of taxicabs and demanded the city’s aldermen pass a bill for that purpose. ²⁸ By July 1922, efforts to regulate taxicabs and mandate taximeters in that city had been held up by litigation for eighteen months. ²⁹ Five months before the Citizen’s 1922 editorial, taxi drivers in Topeka, Kansas, announced their plan to contest that city’s recently passed ordinance requiring taximeters. ³⁰

These conflicts suggest how contentious the production of capitalist space, particularly mobile space, could be and the challenge involved in effectively governing privatized mobile spaces at a distance. This was particularly the case in smaller cities, whose experiences scholars of urban history have often overlooked. ³¹ Asheville fits this profile, as its population grew from 18,762 to 50,193 between 1910 and 1930. ³² However, the city’s growth rate matched that of more populous southern cities during this period. ³³ Growth in Asheville and elsewhere prompted a shift in strategies of urban governance from regulation and response to active service and intervention. ³⁴ City police forces, for instance, pursued the objective of crime deterrence instead of “passive reaction to complaints.” ³⁵ Urban growth and mass culture strained paternalistic patterns of licensing and surveillance based on the personal presence of police. This was particularly true in New South locales like Asheville. Southern cities had to adapt their policing strategies to rapid growth in the early twentieth century. Residents’ expectation that their cities provide a greater range of services strained city governments’ resources, rendering paternalism a less viable strategy for the elites who held power in Southern locales. ³⁶

The running conflict in Asheville between 1914 and 1922 over taxis provides an instructive example of how urban authorities sought to manage challenges to their paternalistic policing power in this period of rapid urbanization. The management of the taxicab industry highlights the limits in strategies of governance dependent on personal knowledge of inhabitants’ characters or personal presence in suspect spaces. It also illustrates the frustrated desire for a constant police presence which some believed necessary to protect patrons in their exchanges with taxi drivers. Asheville city commissioners attempted to maintain influence over what Harvey referred to as the “interlocking sources of social power” of space, money, and time. ³⁷ They sought to buttress their paternalistic power, embodied in the ability to pass judgment on the characters of the increasing numbers of taxi drivers. The regulation they enacted sought to govern exchange between drivers and customers by constructing stable “places” out of taxis in motion. The policies would allow authorities to, in social scientist Michel de Certeau’s terms, “run ahead of time by reading a space” made predictable by ensuring the proper character and economic practices of the driver. ³⁸ City commissioners, judges, and cultural authorities sought to manage the facets of the meeting between drivers and patrons. By attempting to govern exchanges between drivers and customers, authorities were also seeking to govern the kind of territory produced by those exchanges. These regulations attempted to construct abstract, predictable, and transparent places out of taxis in motion. However, in Asheville, this strategy proved unsatisfactory to many. This article demonstrates that each of these phases—where and how drivers could meet customers, the amount the former could charge the latter, and who could act as one or the other—tended to produce spaces that resisted the aspirations of city elites to orchestrate them. ³⁹ As Henri Lefebvre has pointed out, the bourgeoisie encountered “great difficulty in mastering what is at once their product and the tool of their mastery, namely space.” ⁴⁰

The inadequacy of strategies of surveillance reliant on authorities’ personal presence or personal knowledge of an applicant requires us to consider taxis as spaces themselves, however ambulatory. This failure led others in positions of civic leadership to call for alternate ways of exercising oversight, such as the Citizen’s repeated advocacy of the use of taximeters. Such a tool of governance would allow the city to employ some kind of dispersed, mediating force that would constantly be with and between driver and passenger no matter where the cab traveled. It therefore embodied the supposed connection between social regulation and economic development that “business progressives” insisted upon. ⁴¹ This linkage was itself an expression of business progressives’ difficulty in managing the production of space, rather than their ease of doing so.

This article considers three essential elements of exchange between driver and passenger: where the former could meet and solicit the latter, what could be charged and how it would be calculated, and who would be permitted to act as either driver or passenger. After considering how city authorities sought to govern the where, how, and who of taxi transactions and trips, the article concludes by comparing the current faith in the market professed by companies such as Uber with commissioners’ earlier distrust of the market. The knowledge Uber and others claim to organize has allowed them to mediate relations between driver and customer, occupying a place that commissioners themselves struggled to hold consistently.

One of the most consistent sources of conflict between drivers and city authorities was the location where meetings between drivers and would-be passengers would take place. Drivers congregated at certain urban locations, reflecting Asheville’s uneven and rapid urban development. They pressed their claims to key civic and economic sites, such as the train station and the main civic square. Commissioners regulated exchange in part by managing drivers’ access to those and other key sites. City leaders’ priorities for Asheville’s central civic and business square, known as Pack Square after 1903 in recognition of the generosity of wealthy philanthropist and industrialist George Pack, likely undermined drivers’ ambitions to secure a consistent place in such a commercially vital space. ⁴² As Richard Starnes has noted, elites attempted repeatedly to cleanse the square of images that did not fit their conceptions of “high culture, modern urban amenities, and a reputation for southern hospitality.” ⁴³ This conception of the city’s central space was similar to that formulated by city leaders and civic groups elsewhere who strove, in the words of historian Alison Isenberg, to create a “dignified Main Street” and downtown during the Progressive era. ⁴⁴ This vision entailed encouraging some businesses and discouraging others. ⁴⁵

Taxi drivers may have lent support to Asheville civic elites’ preferred image of the Square more readily than hack drivers who relied on animal power. As much as they might facilitate a lucrative trade between city businesses and visitors, taxis nonetheless posed a concern for those who believed they contributed to undignified noise and dangerous congestion. As earlier non-motorized drivers had before them, in April 1916, automobile drivers petitioned city commissioners for secure claims at that central location. ⁴⁶ To obtain this privilege, drivers pledged to behave in a manner appropriate for the square. The economic behaviors they promised to practice were meant to ease the commissioners’ fears that their presence would augment the chaos for which the square was already becoming known, much as city planner John Nolen was soon to observe. ⁴⁷ To allay the concern that drivers would swarm potential customers and contribute to the confusion and disorder of the area, the drivers promised that each one would remain at most an arm’s length away from their car. Only one driver at a time would address a potential customer, and only in a “low tone of voice.” The drivers therefore pledged themselves to perform the cultured manners that city boosters advertised as an attribute of the city. ⁴⁸ They promised not to create a particular kind of social and commercial space on the square to which the board might object. Two years later, this regulatory regime expanded beyond the square. In 1918, drivers could not aggressively attract business while parking their vehicle at any of the city’s authorized public taxi stands. At such stands, they could not stray any further than an arm’s length from the vehicle. Violating this provision would bar drivers from them, with the police empowered to ban offenders. ⁴⁹ By 1920, drivers were expected to wait their turns for fares at taxi stands. ⁵⁰

The ordinance against unseemly solicitation was enforced, at least at times. In April 1919, the arrest of driver Jack Turner for using something other than “word of mouth” to try to attract customers at a public stand led Police Court Judge J. Frazier Glenn to issue a warning to all taxi drivers not to engage in such behavior “during these days of congregated streets.” The arresting officer claimed that the department “received many complaints that people passing the automobile stands are annoyed by the calls of drivers in solicitation.” Moreover, drivers obstructed pedestrians’ movement by congregating together. Limitations on drivers’ opportunities to attract business were necessary for their stable access to the city’s crowded sections. ⁵¹

While there were instances of authorities enforcing such restrictions at certain sites, this enforcement was by no means consistent. Two years after Turner was warned about his excessive solicitation, an editorial in the Citizen noted that solicitous and disturbing appeals from drivers greeted anyone walking downtown, including on Pack Square. The article characterized drivers as apt to “blend into a chorus at the sight of” prospective customers. Apparently, a body of downtown merchants came before the city commissioners on March 2 to state their objection. The group stated that the drivers’ methods could be discomfiting to those nearby. ⁵²

Violence sparked by competition over passengers at central locations was likely even more embarrassing. In May 1919, a “chauffeurs feud” occurred at the square. It began with a soldier in Chick English’s taxi being “taken from the machine by a fellow warrior” before the trip could commence. English believed that a fellow driver, Lawrence Trexler, was responsible for this turn of events. English therefore “whipped” Trexler. ⁵³ Rivalry between drivers for not only passengers but also space had the potential to be violent. In 1920, J. W. Warren received a $100 fine for attempting, unsuccessfully, to explode a competitor’s vehicle that had “appropriated a vacant spot at the curb” at the train station. ⁵⁴ Such incidents disturbed authorities who sought to project particular images of the city at the square and bolstered those who claimed that George Pack’s initial wish to provide a centrally located park conflicted with the convergence of cabs at that location. A May 1919 Citizen editorial called on the Public Works Commissioner Sherrill to remove them from the central square completely. ⁵⁵ Competition and its related conflicts could potentially be disruptive. Such tools as taxi stands were meant not only to provide sites where customer and driver could locate one another but also to provide a way to manage those meetings.

In addition to ordering, managing, and rationalizing competition, the commissioners also sought to regulate their racialized notions of “fair play,” ensuring that others could not mediate contacts between customer and driver. For instance, commissioners charged in 1922 that a prohibition against railroad porters arranging taxis for travelers was being supposedly violated through an informal partnership between African American porters and drivers. Commissioner R. L. Fitzpatrick explained to his colleagues the “facial complications” that constituted an “alleged ‘system’” between these drivers and porters. The porters leaving the Southern Railway depot, he claimed, favored black taxi drivers, and steered customers accordingly. This system was “much to the chagrin of white drivers.” ⁵⁶ In this instance, economic regulation intersected with racialized patterns of employment and whites’ faith in their knowledge of African Americans in the name of preserving some aspects of competition.

How and where driver met passenger was only one dimension of their managed encounter. Setting the rates drivers could charge allowed city commissioners to aspire to govern not only the static places occupied by taxis in the urban landscape but also the mobile and temporary places constituted by taxis in movement, which they sought to make predictable and uniform. Commissioners relied on police officers, judges, and the public to assist in this effort. City authorities, however, appeared unable to consistently enforce both the rate and the requirement that those mandated rates be posted on the taxi cars. Conflict over rates spiked in the late 1910s and early 1920s, indicating that these efforts fell short during a time when the cost of living was increasing rapidly. ⁵⁷

Although the rate ordinance did change in the years after World War I, distance was less important than the number of passengers and time of day in calculating the cost of a ride. In August 1918, the law set a price of thirty-five cents for one person to take a taxi from one point to any other within the city between 7:00 a.m. and 9:00 p.m. In the evening, the limit to the permissible charge increased to fifty cents. ⁵⁸ While there was a zone system at work by December 1919, it offered little clarity, with drivers criticizing it as a prejudiced provision so complex that it required drivers to bring “a lawyer along” to ensure proper interpretation. The zone system did not appear to affect most trips, as the typical fare for the first customer in 1919 was fifty cents. The zone system would also be excised from the September 1920 revision of the fare law. ⁵⁹ The commodification of distance, then, was incomplete and appeared unsatisfactory. The charge for one customer was still fifty cents in August 1920. If two or more customers shared the taxi, it was forty cents per customer. As a corollary of city-set rates, drivers were obligated to take a passenger if offered a legal fare.

There was rising frustration on the part of both commissioners and drivers over the rate levels. In the opinion of Judge Glenn in July 1918, taxi drivers were charging customers more than the legal limit. Glenn cast himself as the defender of the city’s reputation, as he announced his intention to treat harshly any fare offenders so that tourists did not “get the idea that a few unscrupulous drivers who have adopted profiteering tactics are representative” of all taxi drivers in the city, or perhaps of the city itself. ⁶⁰ Drivers themselves were also unhappy with the present settlement. In April 1919, an attorney for multiple drivers, J. Scroop Styles, called for the city commissioners to raise the ceiling to an amount that would treat both drivers and passengers equitably. ⁶¹ Drivers apparently demonstrated their unhappiness by charging more than the mandated rate ceiling. Less than a week later, Judge Glenn again warned drivers who were engaging in such practices. ⁶² While the driver Carl Blackwell was forced to refund the excess amount he charged and pay half the court costs after being convicted of overcharging, however, Judge Glenn did not impose a more severe penalty. Perhaps reacting to this outcome, Commissioner of Public Safety R. L. Fitzpatrick announced shortly afterward that he would revoke the license of those drivers “whose disobedience of the [rate] law is willful.” ⁶³

Part of the challenge was the difficulty of consistent enforcement. In the opinion of observers, the enforcement of the rate limit was intermittent, thus eroding the legitimacy of its enforcement on any particular driver at a particular time. According to what one policeman told the police court, in addition to the lack of consistent enforcement of rates, it was likely that no taxi displayed a rate card in an easily visible spot as required, thus undermining the transparency desired by commissioners. Many of the drivers themselves questioned the sporadic enforcement. One driver heatedly pointed out that “a systematic campaigned [sic] by the police against drivers, instead of an occasional show of vigor when one man out of a hundred complains,” would be more effective. ⁶⁴

Contributing to this uneven enforcement was the transitory and atomistic meeting of customer and driver. The Public Safety Commissioner R. L. Fitzpatrick and others appealed to the populace to assist in enforcement and criticized its shortcomings in doing so. According to one policeman’s testimony, people’s mind-set was partly responsible for uneven enforcement. Patrons who found themselves overcharged were “liberal with criticism of the officers for failure to enforce the law,” only to neglect to show up at court themselves to help the city prosecute offending drivers. ⁶⁵ Commissioner Fitzpatrick repeatedly invoked this difficulty. In December 1919, he asked the community to play a more active role by informing the force about drivers who overcharged or did not display a rate sheet. ⁶⁶ Frustrated, he later criticized “Mr. Public,” in August 1920, who was not as “ready as one might think” to pursue claims in court. ⁶⁷ Fitzpatrick asserted that customers partly shared the responsibility for stopping the practice of overcharging. They had to inform the police of a suspected occurrence and then follow through by testifying during the driver’s subsequent trial. ⁶⁸ The Citizen also joined the commissioner, whose tenure it otherwise panned, in exhorting the public to help enforce the rate law. In April 1919, it cited with approval the initiative taken by a customer, whose quick work in requesting the arrest of an overcharging driver was instrumental in the latter’s conviction. ⁶⁹

The nature of the tourist industry complicated the challenge of enforcing fare limits. In February 1920, the Citizen reported that objections to drivers’ “piratical practices” had not ceased. Apparently, the police had spent much of the previous summer looking into the many reports of overcharging. ⁷⁰ A Citizen editorial in April 1920 reminded readers that although the vexing problem of fares had receded in to the background during winter, it would soon become more urgent with the arrival of more tourists, who were “ignorant of distance and conditions and are natural prey to the irresponsible element among” taxi drivers. The Citizen called on commissioners to solve the problem prior to the beginning of the summer tourist season. ⁷¹

The conflict acquired greater prominence in August 1920, with commissioners facing sharper pressure to act due to the toll that overcharging was allegedly taking on tourists. In that month, the Citizen printed a short letter from “A Visitor” that commended the paper for a recent editorial criticizing authorities. The author noted that their fellow visitors were being victimized by this lack of action: “if ever I saw a game of hold up, it is certainly in the way visitors are being robbed by the taxi service.” The author suggested that the drivers were being poor citizens, helping themselves but hurting their city. ⁷² In addition, the current first lady of North Carolina, Fannie Bickett, had recently registered a complaint that an Asheville taxi driver levied a charge of five dollars for a trip from the train station to a destination in Grove Park, North of downtown. The amount was considered to be too high. This perception spurred the local Board of Trade, soon to rename itself the Chamber of Commerce, into action. Three representatives from the Board asked the commissioners to respond to the many objections regarding excessive fares. ⁷³ The Board of Trade, which had nurtured and promoted the tourist industry in the city since its founding in 1889, fulfilled its intertwined roles of “economic booster and custodian of the city’s reputation.” ⁷⁴ The Citizen applauded the Board and hoped their representatives would succeed where the paper had failed. If this was not the case, the paper recommended a coalition of concerned groups be formed to force action by the reluctant commissioners. ⁷⁵ The public safety commissioner in particular was committing “inexplainable [sic] negligence in not trying to protect the public.” The editorial claimed the current law was flagrantly and repeatedly disregarded on a daily basis, both in terms of rates and the requirement of posting the rates for fares. The editorial invoked the public in its closing: “What can the public do to protect itself? Has the public any redress in such matters? Will some one [sic] please answer?” ⁷⁶

With pressure brought from such self-consciously “representative” institutions such as the Citizen and the Board of Trade, commissioners formulated a new rate law in September. ⁷⁷ The new ordinance raised rates but did not segment the city spatially as drivers had previously advocated. Like the previous ordinance, time was segmented instead. The new ordinance set the base rate for transporting one passenger anywhere within city limits between 7:00 a.m. and midnight. They also set a rate of half a dollar for each passenger for rides with two or more. Between midnight and 7:00 a.m., the rate for one passenger was unchanged, but for two or more, it was seventy-five cents each. The ordinance once again required drivers to post the fares. This had been an unenforced provision of the previous rate law as well. ⁷⁸

The Citizen quickly registered its reservations. The ordinance’s greatest flaw, in the eyes of the Citizen, was its failure to commodify distance. That is, “the new law makes a flat rate of $1 for one fare, regardless of distance.” ⁷⁹ In an additional editorial, the combination of the law’s provisions meant that one driver may have to drive “ten miles for a dollar” by carrying two passengers to destinations on opposite sides of town. Another driver with one passenger going to downtown from the train station would gain the same amount with less effort. The new law, the Citizen maintained,

affords pleasure-riders a fine chance to ride for a trifle. Five of them get together and board an auto at the square, one declaring for transportation to the end of the car line in West Asheville, another to Riverside park, another to Kenilworth entrance, another to the city limit in Grove Park, and the other to the city limit on Merrimon avenue [sic]. Total fare $2.50, total number of miles, count ’em.

Multiple editorials called for the city government to mandate the use of taximeters to securely commodify space, as other cities had done by the early 1920s. ⁸⁰ Commissioners’ solution to the rate conflict that had gone on for several years was, according to the Citizen, almost the least satisfactory outcome imaginable. ⁸¹

Although the low mandated rates were supposedly one reason for the lack of enforcement of the previous rate law, by June 1921, the Citizen again charged that “the determination of fares is left in the hands of the drivers, and most of them believe in taking all that the traffic will bear.” As before, the Citizen highlighted the harm that such unmanaged encounters would do to the tourist industry. Citing a recent incident in which a visitor in town for a Shriner gathering preferred to walk rather than pay a driver’s requested price, the Citizen insisted that the Shriner guest, upon returning home, reported to his acquaintances that the city’s drivers cheated travelers. Summoning an image of the city’s collective will, the Citizen observed that the event occurred despite Asheville’s attempt to impress its guests. ⁸² Again, an ostensibly market-based approach was perceived as tantamount to extortion.

Authorities also defined who could act as passengers and as drivers. The city board first defined the requirements for what were then called “public service automobile” drivers to receive a license in 1914. The city exercised its licensing power by compelling drivers to demonstrate their moral worth and commitment to order. Drivers’ personal reputation was paramount to exhibiting these qualities. The reputation could only be secured, however, by the social and economic standing of those with whom the driver associated. The board mandated that to obtain a public service automobile license, drivers had to provide a “certificate of character signed by five reputable citizens of the City of Asheville who are free holders,” a Jeffersonian echo in a Rooseveltian age of urban regulation. ⁸³ That the ordinance left undefined who would qualify as “reputable” suggested that the personal knowledge networks of city commissioners would play a role in determining that status.

Such assurances were important, as authorities sought to devolve responsibility for enforcing sexual morality on drivers, often by threatening punishment if they were found to have assisted in immoral activities. Officials targeted taxis for harsher punishments than other businesses that also played a role in the city’s vice economy. The board passed two ordinances in the same year that it established procedures for taxi driver licensure. These laws distributed the penalties for businesses’ complicity in improper sexual relations or other activities that had always formed a part of the tourist industry in Asheville as elsewhere. ⁸⁴ Both hotels and public service automobiles were subject to these ordinances. The former would incur a twenty-five dollar fine for knowingly renting a room for the purpose of such activities; for public service automobile drivers, however, the fine was twice that amount. Furthermore, a second violation would result in the loss of the driver’s taxi license for two years. ⁸⁵ The harsh penalty accorded public service automobile chauffeurs suggests the role they were perceived to perform in the interlinked tourist and vice economies. At a time when most people did not possess automobiles, drivers’ rentable mobility posed a threat to moral order.

This threat ostensibly became more dire in the late 1910s. In September 1918, Judge Glenn unleashed a tirade against drivers carried at length in the Citizen during the trial of a driver, Thomas Alexander, accused of not only “receiving stolen goods” but also planning to use them “for immoral purposes.” Paraphrasing Glenn, the newspaper reported the judge’s assertion that the city’s taxi drivers formed a largely unacknowledged “force for evil” in the city. Glenn’s critique focused on the supposed threat to the city’s young women. The schemes of taxi drivers, according to Glenn, led more down the path of disgrace than any other factor. Drivers were acting as procurers, according to Glenn; they ruined formerly innocent girls and left their mothers inconsolable. ⁸⁶

Likening a taxi car to a “hell on wheels,” Glenn believed their drivers possessed dangerous knowledge of urban spaces. They knew where “the dirtiest dives” in the city were located. Furthermore, their devotion to providing services for profit meant that they were quite willing to support sinful behavior in exchange for their fare. Glenn therefore held responsible the market encounters between drivers and passengers. To remedy drivers’ readiness to deliver passengers for profit, the judge proposed a significant change in driver regulation, including a $5,000 bond that would be forfeited if the driver was convicted “of contributing to a girl’s immorality.” ⁸⁷ Doing so would result, Glenn predicted, in the lion’s share of local drivers opting to leave the occupation. Glenn’s recommendation ultimately was not followed although, as we shall see, the commissioners did set a high bond for good behavior in 1921.

Prompted by this patriarchal concern for young women, city authorities attempted to define who could be passengers as well as who could be drivers. In August 1918, Judge Glenn asked commissioners to prohibit female minors from riding in an automobile absent written permission from a parent or guardian. According to the Citizen, Glenn’s effort emerged from the recent arrest of four men who were out from evening until morning with two women under the age of eighteen. The city commissioners took the judge’s suggestion under consideration. ⁸⁸ While such young women were apparently too innocent to ride in automobiles, city authorities also sought to bar known “immoral women” from the use of taxis specifically. In the summer of 1919, Police Court Judge Robert M. Wells mandated arrests of the driver of any car carrying such a woman. As the Citizen noted, although drivers had to carry all legal fares and “may think they have the right of doing business with whomever they please,” that freedom or obligation did not extend to those women considered immoral. Such a belief in their liberty of contract was just an illusion. There were apparently only slight exceptions to this restriction. The driver could take a woman “who is known to be a bad character” to the train station or “on some other legitimate errand.” No vague justification would do; instead, “the belief of the driver in the legitimacy of the errand must be based on evidence of a convincing nature.” According to Wells, any driver found to be transporting such a woman could be arrested, unless the driver “is absolutely certain that the trip is wholly free from illegality.” Wells charged police with the responsibility of keeping a close eye on the passengers riding in taxis; officers were to arrest the driver of any vehicle carrying an immoral woman. ⁸⁹ It is unclear how often this ordinance was enforced. Several months after Wells’s finding, George Sams was arrested for carrying such a woman, Ada Turner, along with two of Turner’s associates. Sams defended Turner’s presence by claiming he was concerned that had he denied Turner a ride, he would have run afoul of drivers’ obligation to carry passengers who offered a lawful fare. The court did not punish Sams. It instead supported the driver’s freedom to allow Turner into the car in the company of her less corrupt associates. ⁹⁰ The lack of punishment for Sams and the polite inaction accorded Judge Glenn’s recommendation suggest that there were limits to city authorities’ willingness to regulate who could access taxis. ⁹¹

Instead, the city government scrutinized drivers’ applications more closely. Wielding this licensing power would help to solve the challenges to regulating the interactions between driver and customer. City commissioners began wielding their licensing power more aggressively at the end of the decade. In July 1919, the police department for the first time delayed a taxi license application. ⁹² The department had concerns regarding the application of Jerry Burrell, who had worked previously as a taxi driver but had been arrested on twenty-six occasions and convicted in eighteen of those since 1912. ⁹³ The police department signaled their opposition to Burrell if he did not supply a significant bond. ⁹⁴ Ultimately, the board refused a license renewal for Burrell. Due to the more severe scrutiny inaugurated by city officials, the erstwhile driver was unable to convince them that he would protect the safety of passengers. ⁹⁵ Burrell’s renewal was denied shortly after an accident on the road to nearby Hendersonville involving a taxi that had left two dead. The Citizen implied that on the heels of this collision, which stirred local unrest, a number of drivers previously licensed did not bother to apply for a renewal in the belief that they would not make it past the more stringent regulations. ⁹⁶

Those rules only became stricter in the next couple of years, with cultural and legal authorities vouching for the necessity of this movement. Anxious over the difficulty in policing supposedly immoral behaviors, the city commissioners in 1921 were “on the war path” against both dance halls and taxi drivers. Unlike dance halls, though, commissioners considered taxis a necessary public service to provide visitors, no matter the vehicles’ attendant disruption. They banned the former for one year while increasing inspection of the latter. Commissioners were convinced that there was no way to satisfactorily regulate dance halls; for taxicabs, their hopes reposed in a more comprehensive and continual driver regulation. Passed in June, in its final form, the regulation’s requirements included certificates attesting to a driver’s good character, a $1,000 bond against a violation of traffic laws, and a background check consisting of any police records dating back to 1915. The regulation mandated continuous scrutiny, as evidenced by the additional requirement that drivers furnish medical certificates every 90 days certifying their freedom from contagious diseases. Noting the small risk to passengers, a Citizen editorial suggested that the real purpose of the provision was to “raise the moral plane of drivers generally by eliminating those whom contagion has stamped as immoral.” ⁹⁷ Earlier drafts of the ordinance published in the newspaper specified venereal diseases. ⁹⁸ Underscoring the protean meaning of “progressive,” one of the city’s daily newspapers, the Asheville Times, termed the law both “stringent” and the “most progressive measure” seen in the city in several months. ⁹⁹ The 1921 ordinance presents not only techniques dependent on “objective” knowledge produced through medical expertise and legal records but also methods that utilize the subjective, broad category of “character” as related by recommendations of those personally known to the commissioners, at least initially. The ordinance therefore represented the mix of “‘seeing like a state’ techniques” and “older, more embodied, and relational ways of seeing urban problems” identified by legal scholar Mariana Valverde. ¹⁰⁰

Through such techniques, the regulation promised to improve both economic practices and social order. Commissioner of Public Safety R. L. Fitzpatrick argued that significant changes were required to guard against men of poor character obtaining municipal sanction. ¹⁰¹ Greater scrutiny was the best possible response, the Asheville Times daily newspaper agreed, to address a “situation which has grown from bad to worse and which has reflected much discredit upon Asheville.” ¹⁰² Taxi drivers’ role in the tourism industry made regulation particularly pressing. Their predatory economic practices would harm the city as a whole as visitors reported their experiences to acquaintances upon return from vacation. ¹⁰³ The Times editorial reflected an attempt to build support among the drivers themselves. It suggested the proposed regulations would ultimately improve their occupation in the public’s estimation. Honest and hard-working drivers, the editorial counseled, should welcome the new regulations, for it was they who suffered when another driver was “hailed into court for too intimate association with the whiskey traffic” or for other transgressions. According to the Times, possessing documentation testifying to one’s respectability would transform the licensed driver from an object of suspicion to an active agent of order who would defend moral standards in the city. This editorial suggested that burdensome new regulations could yet produce self-regulating subjects by removing the “bad apples” from the occupation. ¹⁰⁴

In the run-up to the ordinance taking effect on July 1, 1921, the commissioners finely scrutinized the applications, and particularly the certificates of good “character and sobriety.” Many drivers applied for the new license in between the ordinance’s passage and when it went into effect, after several delays, on July 12. Approval was not a given. On the bright side, only three “reputable citizens” were required to testify to the driver’s qualities, as opposed to the five specified in the 1914 regulation. However, initially commissioners insisted on personally knowing those recommenders. Personal or professional contacts were significant in establishing drivers’ good characters. On June 26, the commissioners approved certificates of good character for three applications, but withheld approval for two other certificates, as they were unacquainted with the recommenders. The Times not only published the names of the successful applicants but also listed those who vouched for those applicants’ characters, exposing the recommenders to scrutiny as well. ¹⁰⁵

Commissioners’ insistence on their personal knowledge of those who vouched for drivers’ characters continued to create delays in the certification process. This determination heightened elites’ concerns that officials’ plans to intensively regulate taxis would obstruct their usefulness during the busy tourist season. For instance, by the last day of June, 1921, the Times voiced its concern that the taxi business would suffer a slowdown after the ordinance went into effect the next day. Only a few drivers had completed the necessary steps for licensure, although applicants had submitted approximately forty certificates of character. The great majority of these, however, “were not passed by the commissioners because board members were unfamiliar with the persons recommending the applicant.” ¹⁰⁶ The power of personal endorsement could make the difference in individual applications. For instance, the commissioners cautiously approved the application of one driver despite his six unnamed previous convictions. They took this action both because he was the sole provider for his mother and because he had a sponsor who “spoke a good word for the applicant . . . and that [he] would tread the straight and narrow hereafter.” ¹⁰⁷ For African American drivers, commissioners’ initial insistence on personally knowing potential drivers’ recommenders may have made an already arduous process more difficult, while placing influence in the hands of a few African Americans and whites who had previously represented African Americans’ concerns in front of the board. ¹⁰⁸

Commissioners’ restrictions on who could act as recommenders made it clear that drivers themselves had no social capital which to circulate through their signatures. Despite the difficulty in implementing the new ordinance, the commissioners disallowed what they termed “doubling up,” or one driver vouching for another. Drivers did not have the status to represent others in their field. By terming it “doubling up,” the board delegitimized a common networking strategy in other occupations. ¹⁰⁹ Drivers, though, could not confirm their colleagues’ characters. The Times’s suggestion that the regulation would transform drivers into more respectable citizens notwithstanding, their inability to vouch for one another suggests they remained suspect.

Despite application difficulties, the city initially swore to immediately enforce the new requirements. The commissioner of public safety warned that police would arrest all drivers in violation once the new ordinance went into effect. ¹¹⁰ However, implementation of the new law was delayed, thereby not disrupting the taxi service as the Times had feared. Although the police arrested eight drivers on July 1 and a dozen total, the city granted them and other drivers an extension through Monday, July 11. ¹¹¹ Commissioners granted twenty-six more licenses on that day. By July 12, the first day of the regulation’s enforcement, 104 drivers were licensed under it, which was about one half of the approximately two hundred in the city. ¹¹²

Although the ordinance survived a legal challenge in Superior Court by attorney and former city counsel Marcus Erwin, who represented at least thirty drivers, the issue of exorbitant charges continued to be a concern. ¹¹³ The May 25, 1922, Citizen editorial discussed at the beginning of this article may have been the most heated of this whole episode, as the paper’s repeated advocacy of taximeters went unheeded. The taximeter would have facilitated commissioners’ incompletely realized project of constructing taxis as abstract, transparent, and predictable places even when made mobile by marketplace encounters between patrons and drivers. The taximeter would have been a step toward fixing taxis in motion as more predictable and uniform places. In May 1922, the Citizen cheered the possible entry of the Yellow Taxi Company in the Asheville market, envisioning the “cold satisfaction of watching the flying indicator of a taximeter” that would be experienced by a customer. The vision focused on the sure knowledge communicated by the meter. In an era when city boosters competed with other cities to appear more modern, the Citizen claimed that such technology was ubiquitous in larger cities in the eastern United States, casting Asheville’s taxis as behind the times. The taximeter promised to police taxis without interfering with their ability to provide a service to visitors. The commissioners, the paper noted, had previously let the question of taximeters go unanswered. Echoing its contrast made two years earlier between the perceived inaction of the city commissioners and the activities of civic groups, the Citizen noted that the Chamber of Commerce was working with the Yellow Taxi Company to secure a place for the company’s taxis in the city. ¹¹⁴ Several months later, the paper celebrated the arrival of the Yellow Taxi Company and its taximeters, which would “place the question of fares on a business basis,” suggesting that previous market interactions between driver and passenger in some way fell short of constituting “business.” ¹¹⁵

City authorities sought to mediate the different dimensions of the relationship between driver and passenger, as the unregulated operation of each dimension came to appear to be a threat to the social, spatial, and economic order. The initial contact between driver and would-be passenger was regulated in terms of where and how it could occur. The city government used its power to facilitate access to privileged spaces to manage competition between drivers. City commissioners defined proper solicitation at key sites, mandated that drivers wait their turn for customers at taxi stands, and obligated them to accept a fare that met the amount set by the city. These steps not only regulated competition between drivers but also impacted the relationship between driver and customer. Drivers who charged what they could rather than the city-mandated fees were likened to brigands. Passengers apparently rarely pursued grievances against drivers, if they found out at all that drivers had charged them more than allowed. Finally, who could be passenger and who could be driver was a basic part of this management. Judges in particular sought to limit the access of women judged too innocent or too depraved, although they received inconsistent support from other authorities, who instead focused more intensively on who could qualify to be a taxi driver. To some extent, these attempts all fell short of authorities’ expectations.

The contentious and unsatisfactory paternalistic regulation of taxis, centered on knowing the drivers and policing fixed space, led to projects focused on dispersed and objective urban knowledge. As an editorial in the Citizen admitted in April 1919, it was impossible for authorities to “be present at every transaction between the public and the chauffeurs.” This statement was an admission of the failure of regulation to create regularity. It was a clunky and absurd vision of the dispersal of regulatory oversight. The editorial’s proposed solution was that all prospective passengers “should carry a card, obtainable at police station [sic]” that would state the charges drivers could legally assess. The card would repair the dynamics of exchange that ostensibly favored drivers. ¹¹⁶ Such a plan also envisioned a relatively crude and ungainly diffusion and circulation of urban knowledge. The technology of the taximeter, however, suggested a more efficient means of policing drivers through the diffusion of an apparently objective surveilling mechanism that offered its own disciplinary combination of money, space, and time. The regulation of taxis demonstrated apparently competing yet ultimately complimentary forms of urban policing: individualized knowledge cultivated through personal relationships and dispersed ostensibly objective discipline. Taxis’ production of mobile, evanescent, capitalist space challenged the former while spurring projects dependent on the latter. 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 in effect know the city. Taxis required city officials to consider how to “act at a distance” rather than implement direct oversight. The installation of taximeters, a contentious dispersal of power in many cities early in the twentieth century, represented what government studies scholar Colin Gordon has termed the “delegation of regulatory oversight (and power) to the micro-level.” ¹¹⁷

The taximeter was a knowledge-production technology that could seemingly help city authorities shape the relationship between driver and passenger. In the last few years, however, new knowledge-production technologies and political power have reshaped this arrangement and empowered companies such as Uber and Lyft to assume this responsibility, based on the promise of their ability to deliver the predictability, transparency, and uniformity that authorities in Asheville also strove to produce from taxis in motion. Confident in their ability to deliver these attributes and their command of knowledge, companies like Uber perceive order in their marketplace and equitable, fair treatment between driver and customer. Uber’s model relies on technology that supposedly enables the market, rather than a local government, to provide both economic and moral regulation of its drivers. In contrast, Asheville authorities saw the market as an enemy whose unstructured operation would ensure transactions were harmful to visitors and the city as a whole.

Observers have identified a number of factors, including significant numbers of young adults either in school or embarking on careers along with limited public transit to help explain the growing presence of these companies in North Carolina. ¹¹⁸ Along with a relative lack of regulation, these trends help explain why as of July 2016 Uber was available in more than a dozen cities in the state, including Asheville. In contrast to standard taxicabs, city licensing power did not extend to Uber drivers. ¹¹⁹ A 2013 state law removed “so-called digital dispatching from city and county oversight.” ¹²⁰ This faith in the company’s ability to manage the market, and in turn make the market a manager, is facilitated by technological individuation that Uber’s proponents believe simultaneously empowers and polices both users and drivers. The ratings that drivers and passengers provide for one another at the conclusion of their time together provide assurance; supposedly, both rider and driver are regulated not only by their own individual feedback but the social and aggregate feedback of their peers in a kind of moral marketplace. Uber fares are also determined by the market, as it boasts a real-time mastery in “matching supply and demand for cars.” ¹²¹ Prices are often below those offered by traditional taxi companies. At other times “surge” pricing may raise fares significantly. Crucially, the customer agrees to the pricing prior to entering the cab.

Uber’s model reflects the increasing faith in market solutions and individuation in the past several decades as well as the role of technology in enabling that faith. ¹²² The relationship between social regulation and economic development is mediated by technology and would seem to have deepened as a result. Instabilities within this system persist, though. As one observer of the industry has noted, misleading reviews are destructive to “an industry built entirely on trust between strangers.” ¹²³ Stories of Uber-affiliated drivers who are accused of sexual assault circulate in local and national media, even while those stories note that each year sexual assault charges are also leveled at many traditional cab drivers. ¹²⁴ The company conducts its own background checks of its fleet of part-time drivers and has fought to maintain control of the process. It has resisted attempts by multiple states to subject its drivers to background investigations as extensive as those faced by standard taxi drivers. ¹²⁵ A number of state legislators claim the company’s tests fall short of their state’s standards for licensing drivers of “traditional” companies.

The steps taken by the city government in the early twentieth century to govern drivers differ from those taken by Uber. The city commissioners chose to distrust the market as a mechanism for regulating either the rates or the characters of drivers. They placed themselves and their personal relationships at the center of the regulatory process. They hoped that their ability to facilitate access to key city sites would allow them to dictate not only where but also how drivers would come into contact with passengers. The taximeter appeared to provide an opportunity to create knowledge that would help mediate the relationship between driver and customer. The kind of knowledge Uber can bring to bear on a marketplace meeting between driver and customer is quite different. Furnished with that knowledge, Uber places the burden of discipline on the market. The market solutions offered for the company’s drivers are in part enabled by technology unavailable in the early twentieth century. The strategies pursued, however, have aimed to create similar places mobile but predictable, temporary but with consequential afterlives, and uniform in logic but responsive to passengers’ desires.