The Think Tank on Wheels

Picture the most influential think tank in your city. You are probably imagining a glass-fronted building, researchers in pressed shirts, whiteboards covered in diagrams, and a newsletter that five thousand serious people read over their morning coffee. You are almost certainly not imagining a fifteen-year-old Toyota, a pine-scented air freshener swinging from the rearview mirror, and a man who has been behind the wheel since before you woke up.

You should be. Because in communities around the world — and especially in smaller ones, where the distance between a rumor and a policy is sometimes just a few conversations — the taxi driver operates as one of the most potent and least credited forces in shaping how people think, what they believe, and what they decide to do about it. They are, without a job title or a grant or a board of trustees, an informal think tank. And unlike the formal kind, he never stops running.