Every ride has a price

If you are a group of two or more, and if you don’t have your own vehicle (or say you are visiting a place where you don’t have your own vehicle), what would you do when all of you wish to head to another place together? Chances are high that one of the members of the group will use an app of a ride-hailing service to book a taxi or an autorickshaw to get you from one place to another. 

You know how much you would be paying at the end of the ride, or at least thereabouts, before you get on the vehicle. Agreed, you might have had to add a tip to get the ride, or still negotiate with the driver before you get on it. But you would have had a ballpark figure and the notion that you were paying a fare price for your ride. 

It might seem like vehicles that run on these services are almost everywhere, especially if you live in one of the metros. These services in itself, however, are rather young and have only been around for less than a couple of decades. For over a century before that, the onus of finding the fair price of a ride was on taximeters. 

Taximeters are devices that calculate the price for a ride. These instruments when used properly in a hired vehicle like a cab or an autorickshaw, automatically show the passengers the fare that they are due to the drivers at the end of the ride. 

Taximeters are still in use in places around the world, despite the rise of app-based solutions. They are even the norm in locations where regulations mandate their installation, either for transparency or legal compliance. They’ve been around since 1891, thanks to German inventor Friedrich Wilhelm Gustav Bruhn. 

There have been taximeters that print a receipt at the end of the ride.
| Photo Credit:
The Hindu

The man behind this meter

Born on November 11, 1853, in Lubeck, Germany, Bruhn was the youngest son in their family. His formative years were spent in a humanistic gymnasium that not only focussed on classical education, but also laid emphasis on emerging sciences. The fact that he lived in a city that boasted vibrant workshops and strong trade networks, coupled with his schooling in one of Lubeck’s intellectual hubs provided the perfect foundation for his future contributions. 

As an inventor, Bruhn is best known for coming up with a mechanical device, the modern taximeter. With urban transportation exploding in much of Europe, the time was ripe for a fair fare-measuring device that would prevent overcharging by drivers and thus regulate cab prices. Working at a precision instrument company Westendarp & Pieper in Hamburg, Bruhn built on earlier designs to come up with a mechanism that was commercially viable. 

The taximeter that he came up with focussed on reliability and automation, and had many of the features still found in these devices today. These included mechanisms to prevent fraud during operation, and adjustable tariffs to account for the number of passengers, the time at which the ride was being taken, the luggage being stowed, etc. 

Bruhn applied for a patent for his invention in Germany in 1891 and was awarded the patent early in 1892. Months later, in March the same year, Bruhn applied for a U.S. patent for the same device, and his patent titled “Fare registering apparatus for vehicles” was awarded on November 1, 1892. 

By 1897, German engineer Gottlieb Daimler incorporated Bruhn’s invention in the Daimler Victoria, thereby making it the first taxi fitted with a taximeter. While the Daimler Victoria was gasoline-powered, the first internal combustion-powered cabs with taximeters were still a decade away, and are believed to have hit the roads of London on March 22, 1907. Having found their way to London, taximeters soon gave the name for the vehicles on which they were mounted, and a new word made its way into the English language. 

The mechanical variety that Bruhn invented made way for digital taximeters with the advent of technology. These days, there are digital taximeters, GPS-based taximeters, and hybrid taximeters that combine electronic sensors with GPS. 

We can’t vouch for the hoarding in the background, but taximeters did make cabs super. This might come as a surprise to you, but there was a time when the motor vehicle inspector used to check the seal of a taxi fare meter. This picture is from one such surprise raid in Chennai.
| Photo Credit:
THE HINDU ARCHIVES

How do electronic taximeters work?

In the simplest sense, taximeters — irrespective of their type — measure distance and time and convert it to a fare based on the law of the land. The final meter price is usually determined based on three factors: boarding rate, mileage rate, and time rate. The administrators of the place in which the taxi or rickshaw is plying determine the maximum rates for each of these three components on a regular basis. 

So in order to determine the fare, the taximeters measure the distance travelled and the time elapsed during the ride. In order to calculate distance, electronic taximeters employ electrical pulses. A sensor is attached to the car’s transmission system and its sends a pulse to the taximeter every time the taxi travels a fixed distance. The number of pulses that are sent out for each kilometre is calibrated initially and hence the total distance travelled can be determined by the taximeter at the end of the ride. 

Determining the time is more straightforward as the start time is activated the moment the driver starts the meter and the end time is known when the driver stops the meter. Based on the time and distance, the fare is determined. 

By doing this, taximeters transformed the taxi industry at a fundamental level. From the days of its mechanical predecessors, the taxi industry saw a radical shift. Gone were the days of negotiations (understandable if you are thinking “really?!?” since this is still prevalent in India, be it for vehicles that use taximeters or those backed by ride-hailing apps) and fixed fares that often led to disputes, and they were replaced by an automated, transparent metering system. 

Taximeters were instrumental in reducing friction between drivers and passengers. This not only improved the efficiency of the overall system, but also fostered trust in the ride-hailing model of transport across the globe. 

The Knowledge effect

Did you know that the drivers of the famed London blacks cabs — fitted with officially tested, calibrated, and sealed taximeters as regulated by Transport for London (TfL) — are subjected to the most rigorous memory and navigational exams in the world? This world-famous test, dubbed as the Knowledge, began about 160 years ago and requires the taxi drivers to memorise 320 routes, nearly 25,000 streets, and about 20,000 landmarks and points of interest within a 10km radius of Charing Cross. 

Passing this test, which takes on average anywhere between three to six years, is mandatory to get a license to drive the black cabs. The TfL takes pride in its taxi service and calls it the best in the world, and such a test ensures that the drivers have a thorough knowledge of London, enabling riders to hail a taxi and go anywhere.

Passing the Knowledge requires one to possess a certain knowledge, which has now been shown to affect the drivers’ brain! Based on a small brain-imaging study published in 2000, London cabbies were found to have unusually large hippocampi. 

The hippocampus is not only responsible for navigation and spatial memory, but is also a part of the brain that degrades in people with Alzheimer’s disease. Possessed with this information, four Harvard researchers conducted a follow-up study, the results of which were published in the medical journal BMJ late in 2024. 

By looking at Alzheimer’s-related deaths between 2020-22 among nine million people across over 400 occupations, the researchers were able to find out that taxi drivers and ambulance drivers were the two occupations with the lowest mortality. People in both these jobs use their hippocampi on a regular basis in everyday work. 

Compared with nearly 4% of people dying as a result of Alzheimer’s disease across all occupations, only 1% of taxi drivers and less than 1% of ambulance drivers die as a result of this disease. While it is still too early and plenty of research is definitely needed, there might be some merit in occasionally memorising routes and landmarks, rather than being over-reliant just on navigation apps.