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The dream of a taxi driver is to have a series of fares with no gaps in time or distance. Good, sober, cheerful, well-heeled people with money in their pockets and a destination on the other side of town.
Of course, the reality is usually somewhat different, and when my teacher Mike spent some time describing a good series of passengers he'd had that morning, I guessed that this was reasonably rare. He'd had several passengers wanting long rides, and he'd had the luck to find fresh passengers waiting when he completed each trip.
So for a matter of an hour or so, he had a passenger paying for his time and travel, and the profits for the day were building up.
This put him into a fine frame of mind, so that when he picked me up, he felt that he was ahead of the game and could spend a bit of time teaching me, to the detriment of pursuing an optimum strategy of chasing after fares.
This is an area where inside knowledge and an appreciation of how the ebb and flow of travel patterns helps to separate the players and the stayers. I've got a lot to learn on this, but I'm pretty good at understanding systems, so I should do OK.
Canberra isn't a large community. About 300 000 or so, which means it's a tiddler of a town compared to Sydney a couple of hours down the road. We have the Federal Parliament here, and although members of parliament are entitled to transport by the Commonwealth's fleet of limousines (AKA great white whales), their research assistants and political advisors have to find their own way from the airport to Parliament House. And that generally means they have to take taxis. They arrive on Monday mornings and leave on Thursday afternoons, and in between they want transport around the city.
Every weekday there is a morning exodus to the airport, as hordes of public servants and military officers head interstate for meetings, and a corresponding return wave in the evenings.
There are also other local tides; students and staff of the five universities, diplomatic traffic, pensioners heading in and out of the main shopping centres and so on.
And, of course, there are those who find a watering hole in the evening and need transport back home several hours later. I can't say that I'm looking forward to carting drunks around.
So, as a cab driver, I'll need to be aware of the traffic, where it's coming from and where it's heading to. I'll need to keep track of times, so that I can change my tactics according to the time of day, making sure that my cab will be top of the queue for the plum jobs.
I also need to be aware of bottlenecks. It used be said that Canberra didn't have a rush hour, but that's gone by the board. Successive governments have gone for big ticket land sales, centralising office buildings and shops in the middle of the city and extending the suburbs relentlessly out. The old decentralised strategy, where office buildings in town centres keep people and employment together, is barely paid lip service now. It seems that everyone heads into Civic to work and jams up the road, which of course were never designed for these traffic flows.
Finding ways to save time by avoiding choke points and traffic lights is essential to optimising earnings in peak periods, so cabdrivers are forced into becoming "rat-runners", taking residential streets to bypass the main roads full of nine-to-fivers.
All of this is going to become second nature to me soon, but for the time being, it's all theoretical, and in an industry where the customers are standing around impatiently checking their watches, it won't pay to be the second cab in the right spot.
Of course, the reality is usually somewhat different, and when my teacher Mike spent some time describing a good series of passengers he'd had that morning, I guessed that this was reasonably rare. He'd had several passengers wanting long rides, and he'd had the luck to find fresh passengers waiting when he completed each trip.
So for a matter of an hour or so, he had a passenger paying for his time and travel, and the profits for the day were building up.
This put him into a fine frame of mind, so that when he picked me up, he felt that he was ahead of the game and could spend a bit of time teaching me, to the detriment of pursuing an optimum strategy of chasing after fares.
This is an area where inside knowledge and an appreciation of how the ebb and flow of travel patterns helps to separate the players and the stayers. I've got a lot to learn on this, but I'm pretty good at understanding systems, so I should do OK.
Canberra isn't a large community. About 300 000 or so, which means it's a tiddler of a town compared to Sydney a couple of hours down the road. We have the Federal Parliament here, and although members of parliament are entitled to transport by the Commonwealth's fleet of limousines (AKA great white whales), their research assistants and political advisors have to find their own way from the airport to Parliament House. And that generally means they have to take taxis. They arrive on Monday mornings and leave on Thursday afternoons, and in between they want transport around the city.
Every weekday there is a morning exodus to the airport, as hordes of public servants and military officers head interstate for meetings, and a corresponding return wave in the evenings.
There are also other local tides; students and staff of the five universities, diplomatic traffic, pensioners heading in and out of the main shopping centres and so on.
And, of course, there are those who find a watering hole in the evening and need transport back home several hours later. I can't say that I'm looking forward to carting drunks around.
So, as a cab driver, I'll need to be aware of the traffic, where it's coming from and where it's heading to. I'll need to keep track of times, so that I can change my tactics according to the time of day, making sure that my cab will be top of the queue for the plum jobs.
I also need to be aware of bottlenecks. It used be said that Canberra didn't have a rush hour, but that's gone by the board. Successive governments have gone for big ticket land sales, centralising office buildings and shops in the middle of the city and extending the suburbs relentlessly out. The old decentralised strategy, where office buildings in town centres keep people and employment together, is barely paid lip service now. It seems that everyone heads into Civic to work and jams up the road, which of course were never designed for these traffic flows.
Finding ways to save time by avoiding choke points and traffic lights is essential to optimising earnings in peak periods, so cabdrivers are forced into becoming "rat-runners", taking residential streets to bypass the main roads full of nine-to-fivers.
All of this is going to become second nature to me soon, but for the time being, it's all theoretical, and in an industry where the customers are standing around impatiently checking their watches, it won't pay to be the second cab in the right spot.
