Taxi Driver Online

Oh aye, I was trying to say as well that St Andrews disproves the Sherrif''s theory because if you say its 30% hail and 70 phoned in Edinburgh then in small towns because theres less hail work it would be 20 hail and 80 phoned, so if the sheriff was correct about the mobiles then in the smaller town PH growth would be even higher than in the cities, but since in St. Andrews because PH have reduced the sheriff falls flat on his face.

The Dundee figures show the same thing and also show the same PH growth due to taxi caps as Edinburgh, but the dereg and the new WAV requirement complicates things .

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Dundee rocks. Almost.

I wouldn't be that precise about the taxi numbers, because we've had mega-fare increases in recnet years which I think has increased numbers more than they should. At the same time all you need now is a mobile phone and you can get some booked work, so the drivers are saving £100 a week or so that the offices charge, so the number of independents has gone up from a couple to 20 or more.

So high fares and lower cost have led to more taxis than there would be, but there would certainly maybe bo 60-70.

But the PH numbers are a defo, since theres always been about 4 or 5, and these were mainly office props and controllers etc, who knew that PH was less hard on their cars, it was nothing to do with what was happending in Dundee and other places.

But about springtime a couple of the PH went yellow plate, so theres just 2 left. In fact they are really used by the offices to do the more executive work, so I wouldn't really class them as doing taxi style work at all.

So really the PH sector in St Andrews has disappeared this year.

I think the St Andrews scenario nicely demonstrates that much PH growth in restricted areas is due to just that - restricted numbers.

There are many small towns and suchlike in the country where there's minimal PH numbers and although taxis have increased in recent years there hasn't been any huge spurt in PH numbers.

Of course, in the bigger cities it's normally a bit harder to get into the taxi side, so there'll be a PH sector regardless of restricted numbers - for example, I think there's no PH knowledge in Edinburgh, and there's certainly a PB requirement, so you'll always get people going into PH rather than taxis.

However, it's the growth comparisons that are interesting, and I see no reason why PH and taxis shouldn't be growing at the same rate if unrestricted, so the PH growth in Edinburgh while taxis remain stagnant will certainly reflect restricted numbers on the latter.

In M&R we had figures for Brighton, where in the last decade taxi numbers were even slower in growth terms than in Edinburgh. But in just three years from 2000 - 2003 PH increased from 328 to 444.

But in Brighton the saloon taxis and PH have to reach much the same standards, so it's almost certain that if they had the option, all that growth would have occured in taxi numbers rather than PH. Unlike in Edinburgh, the cars work for the same offices, have meters fitted and charge the same fares, so there would be absolutely no reason to go PH unless forced to.

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