One of a fleet of 600 taxis leaving the garage at the beginning of a shift, March 1941.

Source:
Paris en Images, copyright LAPI / Roger-Viollet (LAP-1877A):
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Gaito Gazdanov's Paris / 50

The taxi driver's third preoccupation is taxi driving itself, which both fascinates and repels him. Taxi driving provides him with a living, allows him more free time than does any other available occupation and gives him valuable insights into people and their lives, but at a terrible cost:

"I would not have learned as much – and only half of what I know would be enough to poison many human souls forever – if I had not become a taxi driver." [46]

Fifty years later another Russian emigre, Vladimir Lobas, used this quote as the epigraph for Taxi from Hell, his 1991 book about life as a cab driver in New York City.

As well as being a major novel by a renowned writer, Night Roads has a another claim on our attention. It’s an early example of a genre that first emerged with books like Robert Hazard’s Hacking New York (1930) and Herbert Hodge’s Cab, Sir? (1939).

The genre, a mix of anecdotes, reflections and autobiography, might best be called the taxi driver memoir. Since the 1930’s all sorts of taxi drivers in many countries have published these memoirs and examples, good and not so good, are now legion.