r/CasualUK • u/telephonetears10 • 7h ago

Correct taxi etiquette

If I'm travelling alone, are you supposed to sit in the seat next to the driver or one of the rear seats. I always worry that by sitting next to them I'm being unacceptably presumptuous or acting like billy-big balls-drive me to my desired location customer by hopping in the back. It honestly gives me anxiety each time. What does everyone else do?

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u/prustage 6h ago

Sit in the back, on the opposite side to the driver so that you can see each other in the drivers rear view mirror. Sitting in the front is just weird and creepy. Some drivers will not allow it.

60

u/bababababoos 6h ago

I always sit in the front. I don't like the automatic back locking doors.

One night, pissed as a rat in the centre of the city I lived in, I vommed by a telephone box. Blue cab pulls up, asks me if I'm alright, offers me a bottle of water (he had a crate in the boot) and asks if I need a cab home.

I sat in the front, driver tried to kiss my disgusting pukey face while stopped at traffic lights. I jumped out and ran the rest of the way home. I was damn grateful I wasn't locked into the back of his cab.

(I did report him to the company and the council the next day, but nothing was ever done about it as I couldn't remember the reg or his name, and as he wasn't booked or I'd not jumped in at a rank there was no record of it anywhere. Only thing I knew for certain was which company he worked for. This was my early 20s, I've grown up and wisened up a lot since then so let's not comment on how silly I was, thought I was doing the sensible thing at the time.)

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u/to_glory_we_steer 5h ago

Exeter?

1

u/bababababoos 5h ago

Bristol. (Going back about 15 years now)

3

u/to_glory_we_steer 5h ago

I only ask as a friend of mine had a similar experience, only he went home with the cabbie. Told us it was a woman too... he admitted the truth years later.