COMMENTS & CURIOSITIES:

Some are good, some are bad, some are cool, some are not. Not people. Ideas.

The Costa Mesa Hilton and the Balboa Bay Club and Resort have come up with an idea that is way beyond cool and definitely good, which eliminates bad and not.

On Friday, the Costa Mesa Hilton inaugurated a new service, providing London-style cabs to chauffeur its guests near and far in a distinctively British style. The Balboa Bay Club will kick off its version of the Anglicized cab service this week.

If you’ve ever been to London, you are intimately familiar with the chubby little black cabs — properly called hackney carriages — that fill the city’s streets from curb to curb as far as they eye can see, which in my case is not very far.

The London cabs at the Hilton and the Balboa Bay Club are being provided by a San Clemente company called Her Majesty’s Ride. While they are new and shiny and a bit updated versus their British counterparts, they are authentic to the core and have that unmistakably chubby and lovable look all London cabs have.

Well, OK, with one exception — the steering wheel on the American cousins is on the left side, not the right side, which as any Colonist knows, is the wrong side.

“We don’t want to confuse people too much,” Shaun Robinson, the Hilton’s general manager, said with a touch of irony.

I have spent more than a few hours driving the highways and byways of England and Ireland. For your average Yank, driving on the “wrong” side of the road from the right seat fully focuses the senses, especially making that first right turn from the left lane, which is a religious experience.

Friday’s cab debut at the Hilton had enough pomp and circumstance to make the Queen Mum wave and Sir Edward Elgar write something for the occasion, if either of them was still here, but they’re not so forget that.

Trumpeters in Elizabethan garb heralded the arrival of the three ebony emissaries from Her Majesty’s Ride as they slowly made their way around the thoroughly appropriate roundabout at the Hilton’s main entrance.

One cab eased right through the front doors and into the lobby — not to worry, it was planned — where guests were treated to scones, tea and sweets, which hopefully included Cadbury chocolates and Walker’s shortbread, two of the greatest accomplishments of the British Empire, in my opinion.

One of the nicest parts of the deal is not only do guests at the Hilton get squired around in hip and happening Knightsbridge style, but it’s not a budget buster — flat rates of $12 and up to a set destination and $55 an hour for sightseers who want to see what there is to see, which is a lot.

Taken a cab in Orange County lately? $12 will get you about 200 yards or, if you’ve gone metric, about 182.88 meters. Speaking of London cabs, have you ever heard the testing that would-be London cabbies go through before they can hit the streets and start the meter?

As they say in Hyde Park, c’est incroyable! The crew from Her Majesty’s Ride should thank their lucky stars Orange County is far, far away from London.

First of all, keep in mind the streets of London, like most European cities, were laid out by a deranged person with kidney stones on a three-day binge.

The fear-inducing London cabbies’ exam is called “The Knowledge” and hopeful hack drivers study two years on average before they take it.

A common sight in London is a frantic-looking man or woman on a moped glancing constantly at a map mounted on their handlebars. They’re called Knowledge Boys or Knowledge Girls, and they’re studying for the Knowledge exam.

Wannabe cabbies need to be able to locate virtually every street, square, road, avenue and alley in the city, in addition to hundreds of short cuts, the exact location of major hotels, attractions and public buildings, and 320 or so standard routes throughout the city.

For each route, the applicants must recite the names of the streets taken, the major intersections, the roundabouts, specifying each turn and the major buildings and attractions at each point of the route.

Think being able to name the theaters in the West End is enough?

It is not. They need to know the order of the theaters on every street, in each direction. Something tells me finding South Coast Plaza or Crystal Cove is easier.

So there you have it. If you happen to see a London cab in Newport-Mesa land, now you’ll know where they’re from. Smile, wave, say something British, and if the cabbie looks like Keith Richards, stay out of his way. I gotta go.

PETER BUFFA is a former Costa Mesa mayor. His column runs Sundays. He may be reached at [email protected].