Excerpt from Street Tramways for London: Their Utility, Convenience, and Necessity, With Some Remarks on the Working of Street Railways, in the United States and Canada Among the great cities of the Old and New World, London, the wealthiest, busiest, and most populous of them all, has the evil but well-deserved reputation of being the worst supplied with the means of locomotion. Its four-wheel cabs are a disgrace to the municipal regulations that license and tolerate them - shabby without and frowsy within, with horses and drivers of corresponding wretchedness. The two-wheel cabs or Hansoms are a shade better, more respectable to look at, and more comfortable to ride in; but with the disadvantage of a clumsy and dangerous contrivance in the shape of a descending window, which, in bad weather, is sometimes let down upon the head of the person inside with unpleasant results to his hat or his head if he should happen to be leaning forward in his seat. Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, and other large towns have long possessed Hansom cabs with windows closing laterally, and under the control of the "fare;" but the London cab owners - slow to follow a good example, lest it should cost them a few pounds - stick, for the most part, to the old guillotine style of window, and will doubtless continue to do so until all the existing vehicles in their possession drop to pieces from old age and rottenness. The omnibuses, of which many thousands traverse all the principal thoroughfares from morning until midnight, are even worse than the cabs. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.