The cabby's "better half" takes breakfast. Photo by Arthur Hewitt. Today it is hard to find a photo of a New York street that doesn't have one or more taxis in it, but in 1906, according to Thompson, "The cab is no integral part of New York life." There were only two thousand licensed cabs on the island of Manhattan compared with about 15,000 in Paris and 12,000 in London. The relative unimportance of cabs in New York may have had something to do with the lax regulatory environment that Thompson complains of. Source: Outing magazine, vol. XLIX no. 2, November, 1906, p. 131.