Melville Cooke

So there I was on North Street, downtown Kingston (formerly Zekes Town), heading across to The Gleaner, on a mid-week, mid-morning. There was this insistent horn, but not of the 'wha kin' a driving dat?' blare or the 'wanna ride honey?' variety. It was the 'pi-bip, pi-bip' of the robot taxi variety, but when I looked in the direction of the beeping, close to the intersection of North and East streets, I did not see a robot taxi.

At least, I did not see what I expected to be a robot taxi. I saw a Honda Fit, one of the stale vomit coloured ones, caught somewhere between pink, red and a colour that only men who are really in touch with their feminine sides or watch too much Home and Garden Television with their female partners can immediately identify.

And I thought, damn, how things have changed.

Of course, a Honda Fit, the latest nifty, neat automobile to drive the Jamaican market, especially female drivers (and especially the hottie ones), into fits of delight, is not the typical robot taxi. Pride of place still goes to the white Toyota Corolla of drive-by shooting legend, followed closely (in more ways than one) by the white Nissan Sunny.

(Somewhere in Jamaica, close to the place where they make the numerous SUVs which prowl the roads, there is a place where they train the robot taxi drivers in the art of sweeping the fingertips of the right hand on the road).

Long-term effects

But as unusual as it is, a Fit being used as a robot taxi does point to the long-term effects of the relaxation of the motor vehicle import policy, which began in the 1990s. So a few days after, as I was driving down the upper part of Red Hills Road and heard the familiar 'pi-bip, pi-bip' I was not too surprised to look in the rear view mirror and see a dolled up red Honda Civic. And I have heard that somewhere in the eastern Kingston a Honda Odyssey is being used for the robot runnings.

I remember the precise moment when the 'deportee' car importation came home to me. I called a taxi to get from Upper Waterloo Road back to UWI and waited and waited and waited. I called the company and complained that the taxi had not come and the dispatcher said the driver had called in to complain that he was waiting and nobody had come out. It was then I realised the white Corolla (what else?) which had been on the road outside for the last 10 minutes was the taxi. I had expected a black and yellow Morris Oxford (where have all those gone, anyway?) and, when I got in and the driver asked if I wanted airconditioning or not, I knew that things had definitely changed.

When ladas ruled

I am reminded of a story I heard about the days when the Lada ruled the taxi business, especially outside Kingston. A man drove his Lada to the supermarket, went in, got his groceries and came back out. His car was full of people, the trunk was full of their possessions and they were all sweating and demanding "a whe de driva deh?" It was a Lada, so it must have been a public passenger vehicle.

Now, almost any station wagon can be a taxi, legal or not, and I get impish glee from thinking about the psychological effect on a person who has scrimped and saved to buy and maintain a 'criss' motor vehicle, only to see the same model (and maybe newer and 'crisser' at that) with red plates or merrily 'pi-bipping' down the road, a black hand trailing from the driver's window.

However, unlike the 1980s when Mandeville's bauxite fuelled prosperity was indicated by the seven-seater Volvos which were used as taxis on the run down Spur Tree Hill to Santa Cruz, the 'crissas' and near crissas which are often used as taxis these days do not indicate a prosperous society. Rather, I suspect that a certain level of desperation and resignation is involved.

For when you have a car or access to a car and no income to maintain its unleaded habit, what else to do but run a taxi?