THE JOURNAL OF TRANSPORT AND LAND USE

Over the past few years, private taxi, jitneys, and other paratransit services have blossomed in cities around the world. Scholars have noticed. Two things stand out immediately. First, we don’t know very much about how taxi and paratransit services affect travel behavior and mode choices. Second, we know even less about who uses these systems. Because these services tend to serve niche populations, it is dif-ficult to assess who an “average ” rider is. What we do know about taxi services and para-,transit is that they are important complements of—and occasional substitutes for—conventional fixed-route transit. For decades people have argued that there is substantial promise to the idea that private transit systems can extend the reach of fixed-route public systems (Rosenbloom 1970; Kirby, Bhatt et al. 1974; Rosenbloom 1982; Cervero 1985). Yet arguments for expanding private or deregulated local transit services have been largely ignored. For years public transit providers and taxi operators have opposed ex-pansion of services they view as competitors, but this only partially explains why private transit has been scarce in most cities in North America and Europe. Complaints of competition are not unfounded; since the invention of jitneys, they have succeeded by operating on popular transit routes (see Hodges (2006) for a description of the 1914 jitney fights in Los Angeles). Even though these services follow established transit, they are not perfect substitutes for public transit service, as New York City’s attemp