Taxis were not expensive, they were also easily available and convenient, and an incredible lot of people used them. I mean, you could easily get taxis in the middle of the night in small towns (below 5000 inhabitants) or even more remote villages, and regular low to middle income people would use them with no second thought. Also drivers would not even complain if they called for a short distance trip.
It was a shock for me, coming from France, where nobody 'normal' would ever use a taxi in a 'normal' situation. And if you ever try, you generally do not try again: no availability, extremely expensive price, and generally, as a driver, a moron who complains about you or anything. So most French people only use a taxi every other year to get a ride to the airport, and that habit was so ingrained in me that I never got to initiate taxi rides in Finland because it does not fit in my mental model when I want to get somewhere. But Finns had no such problem :-)
Taxis were not expensive, they were also easily available and convenient, and an incredible lot of people used them. I mean, you could easily get taxis in the middle of the night in small towns (below 5000 inhabitants) or even more remote villages, and regular low to middle income people would use them with no second thought. Also drivers would not even complain if they called for a short distance trip.
It was a shock for me, coming from France, where nobody 'normal' would ever use a taxi in a 'normal' situation. And if you ever try, you generally do not try again: no availability, extremely expensive price, and generally, as a driver, a moron who complains about you or anything. So most French people only use a taxi every other year to get a ride to the airport, and that habit was so ingrained in me that I never got to initiate taxi rides in Finland because it does not fit in my mental model when I want to get somewhere. But Finns had no such problem :-)