jasbar wrote:
A number of councils are switching from quantity to quality restrictions.
Can anyone tell us how they go about this?
Some in England that are derestricting are certainly introducing an element of quality control at the vehicle level, but I haven't heard of anything systematic at the driver level, which is a shame. Also, it's usually a case of WAVs for new plates and the same old saloons for the existing plates (the vast majority of recent derestrictions were mostly saloon previously, I think). To me it just seems like taking the easy way out, because it takes the WAV pressure off and lessens the flak from the existing saloon plates, because there are less new taxis than there would be if a truly level playing field had been introduced.
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The big fear in the trade generally is that binning quantity restrictions will lead to a Dublin situation, chaos.
But, surely it doesn't have to be like this?
I think the Dublin situation was overdone, but that's hardly surprising.
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Edinburgh already has a measure of quality control in the topo test. There are also training modules which are poor, but could be developed to enhance quality. But we wouldn't have to wait for their improvement before de-restricting, the topo test would serve the purpose of maintaining control.
The problem with a lot of these taxi courses that are floating around is that they are of the 'turn up and you'll pass' variety, thus they hardly stem numbers. Of course, whether numbers are restricted or not, there's always pressure from owners to make it easy for new drivers to enter the trade, and only where vehicles are mostly single driver is their a greater impetus to stem the flow of drivers, London being the classic example.
In others, paradoxically after derestricting there's often pressure to make it easier to get a drivers badge, since owners suddenly can't get drivers and that applies to the new plate holders as well as the old. I think one of the Dundee drivers mentioned a trend of that type in Dundee recently - clearly, in terms of overall numbers of cars on the ranks, increasing the number of drivers would just exacerbate any increased numbers cause by derestriction.
Looking at the high driver/cab ratio in Edinburgh there would probably be pressure of this type, since obviously the vast majority of owners are used to having cars double or triple shifted.
I was interested in the reports in the Edinburgh press a few years ago about dumbing down the topo test and then there was the introduction of the new modules etc.
What I couldn't quite understand was that one the one hand it some were pressing for it to be easier to get a badge, whereas others were claiming that the new modules would have the opposite effect - but I also think I read that the modules were in fact intended to make it easier, possibly because a watered down topo test was part of the new regime?
Thus, do the posters from the Edinburgh trade think it's easier or more difficult to get a badge these days as compared to before the new regime was introduced?
I think I read in a recent post that one driver thougth that there were a lot more drivers in the trade, and this could help explain the apparent downturn in work for the blacks, and this he put down to the college course?
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Anyway, can we provide the info to prove to the trade where chnage has still to happen that, non-working owners apart, the trade wouldn't descend into farce when change arrives? Income levels won't drop through the floor under a sea of competition
While taxi vehicle numbers can clearly increase considerably, the less often mentioned number of drivers often changes by a considerably smaller number.
For example, I think there were 6 drivers per car in Dublin, so clearly taxi numbers could have increased substantially without increasing actual supply.
By the same token, since there are around 3,500 taxis in Edinburgh, if each driver chose to run his own vehicle then there could be almost three times as many vehicle but no difference in the numbers on the streets at any point in time.
The big unknown is the shift from PH. In Brighton, for example, the two sides pass the same topo and driving tests, so there's every reason to suggest that most PH would shift to taxis if given the chance (except to the extent that new taxi plates are likely to be WAV, unlike the current fleet, which is mostly saloon). Of course, in Edinburgh, because you are all PB WAVs then the vehicle shift from PH to taxi would be less marked, and obviously there's also a difference in the criteria for PH and taxi badges.
Thus it's impossible to quantify how big the shift from PH to taxi would be - it depends on the local licensing regime.