i was digging through a box of, mostly, ephemera, that i haven’t actually looked in since before we moved into the house out of which we moved 4 years ago, to move into this house. the reason i haven’t looked in it for 20+ years is because i thought i knew what was in it. while that was largely true, there were a few unknown things in that box which i’ve been wondering about for some time. one of those things was the “secret” taxi-driver’s guide to seattle streets.

this was before cell phones, and before most people had even heard of networked computers, much less internet: this was in the mid-1980s, very few people had cell phones, pay-phones were the common way of communicating outside of your house or office, and taxi drivers HAD TO HAVE a way to remember where everything was…

this was it.

this “secret” guide, combined with “The Thomas Guide” map book for king county (colloquially known as the “tommy guide”), pretty much assured that, regardless of how obscure or little-known a street might be, you could get to it without having to ask anyone how to get there.

it had each street name listed alphabetically (or numerically, for numbered streets), and directions for how to get to that street from one other street. if you didn’t know where the one street in the directions was, you looked up that street, and so forth, until you got to a street you know. the “secret” guide also had the number of the map in the tommy guide that included it, so that, if you had a tommy guide (99.8% of cab drivers had one at the time) you could look it up there, as well, but as the tommy guide was a book with A LOT of streets, listed in a not-always-logical order (because it was a map book), i usually didn’t use it. the “secret” guide was more accurate and took up less space. 😉

another thing that the “secret” guide has, which is, maybe, not so useful any longer, is that it has the major bus routes for every street. as far as i know, what we now know as “seattle metro” was a completely different organisation in the mid-’80s, and i sincerely doubt that any of the bus information is reliable these days…

however, streets don’t change that much. fourty years later, much of this “secret” guide is still perfectly usable… a lot of the building names have changed, and things like the kingdome and the alaska way viaduct are no longer there… but it won’t spy on you and steal your data, like google will. 😒