If you watch old movies, you will note that taxicab drivers used to wear uniforms-it was an officer’s style cap, with a jacket and tie. Nowadays, cab drivers dress pretty sloppily-when did the cab companies stop enforcing this dress code? Personally, I think uniforms would look better-of course, given the decline in dressing standards, this is unrealistic. :mad:
Many of the taxi drivers in Sydney wear uniforms. Generally they’re the ones who drive for the “prestige” companies.
When did men stop wearing three-piece suits? It’s not a snark, but the same sort of question – there was a shift, varying from region to region and city to city and individual to individual, with no perceptible “August 24, 1979: Taxicab drivers stopped wearing uniforms on this date.”
One major influence may be, oddly, the cost of insurance. This gets bizarre, but makes sense once spelled out. At one time, taxicab drivers were, by and large, the employees of taxi companies, notably the Yellow Cab fleet, which was multiurban and had a trademark on the name and the bright yellow hue of the cars. If one were an independent, one was competing with the big companies and compelled to appear as professional as they.
As auto insurance costs soared, there was a tendency throughout the industry to shift away from company-owned employee-driven fleets to contractual arrangements, where a driver was an independent contractor, and might drive a company-owned cab, his own vehicle or one owned by a third party, but with the taxi company providing dispatch services for the individuals. Needless to say, if you’re self-employed as an independent contractor, you do not have to abide by a dress code.
(This derives from personal awareness of policies in a few companies in fewer cities, through acquaintance with company and vehicle owners and drivers affiliated with them.)
I suspect it may also have grown from a tendency to regard uniforms not as a sense of proud affiliation with a successful firm but as a demeaning “servant” role, as well. To what extent this may have influenced the tendency away from cab drivers’ uniforms I can only guess.
I was born in 1982.
Aside from seeing Uniformed taxi drivers on tv ((Early eps of Pee Wee’s Playhouse)),
I don’t think I have ever been in a cab with a Uniformed driver.
Uniforms in general became much less popular during the very late 60s & into the 70s.
Uniforms once were meant to relfect the professionalness of the military. This popularity of this concept evaporated.
Taxi drivers, gas station attendants, and many others ceased to wear uniforms.
In fact, during the 70’s, some Wisconsin Cub Scout Troops all but stopped wearing uniforms.
They wear them in Japan.
Taxi drivers used to wear patent leather bow ties. These have now disappeared.
However, women’s shoes can still be found with leather flowers on the vamps. This is heartening because bows are meant to mimic flowers; which are themselves used as fertility symbols.
This world needs more, not less, leather fertility symbols.
In at least some cabs I’ve been in recently, the concept of fertility has been communicated by the aroma inside rather than the driver wearing a bow tie. 
What about USPS letter carriers? Uniforms seem to be optional for them in my neighborhood.
Born around 50 years ago, never saw a “real” uniform on a taxi-driver. They did wear a uniform hat, an “Ike” type jacket and a white or blue shirt and a tie. The Jacket would sometimes have a Co patch. I’d guess that the hat and maybe the jacket were issued “uniform items” and the rest was simply “dress code”.
Perhaps it happened when cabbies no longer worked for a taxi company but instead leased the cabs.