Strategy

[skyring]

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.

Comments

[wombles.livejournal.com]

Sounds like you'll meet some interesting people, taxi drivers usually have lots of stories to tell.

Hmm new release zone, "the back of skyrings cab" hehehe

You'll probably get some great ideas for storylines too.

[danadoodle.livejournal.com]

i appreciate a driver thats a 'rat runner' (thats a terrible term to use, you're being savvy). taking a side street that goes cross-town is much faster, tends to be more picturesque (unless its an industrial area, and at the end of the day the streets are dead and can by flown through), and you're not closed in by cars and trucks on busy main streets (which can be hot and air choking).
doodle, who's ridden a cab or two.

you'll get alot of material to write about from this job, pete.

[holmesfan.livejournal.com]

That is so good, hearing about your learning curve. Thanks.
One thing that would interest me is the ratio of cabs to users. Alas, in NZ, there was a relaxation of regulations some time ago and now all sorts of people became cab-drivers, consequently there are far too many cabs in the larger cities. This often causes some of the not-nice cabbies to pinch other jobs. I've been involved in instances like that in Sydney as well. They are infuriating for the drivers who miss out and very embarassing for the passengers when the others fight it out. What is it like in Canberra? I'm sure Mike would know.

[skyring.livejournal.com]

250 cabs in Canberra, for a city of around 300 000 souls. Consensus is that there should be more cabdrivers.

[thebiblioholic.livejournal.com]

In 2005 there was about 13,000 taxi medallions in New York City, for a population of over 8 million which comes out to one in 600 vs one in 1200 for Canberra and during peak times it feels like there aren't enough cabs. Note these are yellow cabs that you can hail on the street or catch at airports. The Taxi and Limousine Commision also licenses "limousines" which are radio dispatched and aren't allowed to pick up fares on the street. In my neighbourhood one rarely sees a yellow cab cruising, so I always have to phone the local car service when I need one. In Manhattan, especially during rush hours, all the major avenues turn into rivers of yellow cabs.

[skyring.livejournal.com]

Canberra has few problems with garaging or parking (or even traffic congestion, mostly), so that might be a factor. It's also a largely middle-class city, so car ownership is probably at a higher rate overall.

Public transport isn't the best either. There is only the government bus network, which could easily be improved upon.

Having said that, when you add up all the costs of running a car, it's cheaper to take cabs if you don't use a car on a daily basis.