When you arrive in strange city and you get off your flight, the taxi driver is usually the first person you come in contact with. You (may) have a chat with him and together you spend half an hour or so in the spatial confines of a car.
In a way, you deliver yourself to the taxi driver. After all, it is his car, and you often don't know where you are going.
In part, it is a matter of having to trust the taxi driver in that he knows how to drive and where to go, preferably without a detour that would increase your expenses. But the taxi driver also plays an important representative role for which he is rarely acknowledged.
Since he is the first person you meet up close - and you get to check him out from the back seat - the taxi ride often feels like a prelude to the rest of your visit.
These were my thoughts last week when I took a taxi around midnight from Miami International Airport to my home in South Miami.
Actually, it was not so easy to concentrate because of the penetrating odors of the half-finished Burger King meal that was sitting on the front passenger seat and the loud country music blaring from the rear speakers:
"I took Mary-Lou for a drive in my new pick -up truck and she said I didn't know you were a pick-up kinda guy."
I wanted to ask the driver to turn down the volume but I think he couldn't hear as he seemed to be getting in a kind of trance.
This one was unusual because most taxi drivers in Miami don't have the radio on (and if they do, the odds are against country music).
More commonly, the trip is eerily silent and you can't wait to get out. They don't speak. If you ask a question, they will answer yes or no, or produce some incomprehensible noise.
Moreover, you don't get the impression that they are so quiet out of respect for the privacy of their clients. Rather, their entire demeanor suggests a lack of interest in you and in their job. Things are so bad in Miami that if a cab driver would ask me if it was my first visit to Miami, I would probably get suspicious about his intentions.
If you think I am just venting my personal frustration in this column, you are right. But that is not all.
More important are the implications of this matter for the competitiveness of Miami. You can change all you want inside the airport, but the moment you step out of the building to make your way into the city, there is the unavoidable taxi ride.
Unfortunately, it would seem that taxi services at MIA - generally speaking - are not on a par with services at most other major airports in the United States, West Europe, and the Far East.
Here's how it goes when you get into a cab at the airport in Singapore. The taxi driver smiles and opens the door for you. The driver looks clean and neatly dressed.
He shaved that day. He speaks English (!) - and Chinese and Malay. The taxi is clean, cool, and does not smell. He strikes up a friendly conversation without being pushy, asking whether this is your first visit to Singapore and whether you are there for business or vacation.
He tells you, with some pride, that most foreigners love the food in Singapore. He points out some famous sites along the way.
Singapore is perhaps extreme, but relatively high standards among taxi drivers can be found in many other cities, from Dublin to Tokyo to Houston. You can even get lucky in Washington, D.C.
This is not about good manners per se, but about professionalism and good business. And it is especially important in a city like ours, with disproportionately large numbers of tourists and visiting business people, and the lack of proper public transportation alternatives at the airport.
How do you change this? How do you turn Miami's taxi drivers - especially those working at MIA -- into professionals?
The first thing that comes to mind is to convince taxi companies to provide their workers with proper training, in order for these companies to get permission to work at MIA. But MIA has since the early '80s been an "open airport system" where every taxi driver who is licensed in Dade County may pick up passengers.
Changing it to a "closed" system would go against national trends and would create a thorny political issue locally.
Another possibility might be to require individual taxi drivers who want to pick up passengers at MIA to be "certified professionals" who have completed, say, a three-day course aimed at raising awareness about client-oriented professional conduct.
The course content could be determined and approved (perhaps even taught) by MIA and paid for by the taxi drivers and their companies. Certification could be for a two-year period, upon which renewal is required. Sure, we should not get our hopes up too high, but perhaps some of the basics can be put in place.
Maybe I am a bit naïve. But those who think this is a matter of no importance may not understand the nature of a service-oriented economy. Or they haven't taken a cab from MIA lately.
I wonder if Angela Gittens has.
Jan Nijman is professor of Geography and Regional Studies at the University of Miami.