Carry On Cabbie

One aspect of public transport I've yet to mention is one of the oldest surviving modes: the taxi. I've decided to tackle this issue for a couple of reasons, which I'll discuss in more detail below.

Even though we've come a long way from the era of the hansom cab (invented in 1843), the basic principle remains the same as it did in Victorian times. Let's take a secenario from one of Conan Doyle's famous stories: a bloke sits around in Baker Street in a black horse-drawn vehicle, chain-smoking, chatting to the other drivers, drinking tea and reading a paper. Suddenly Holmes throws open the door of the vehicle, leaps inside and shouts, 'Whitechapel, my good man – and ride like the wind!' The driver has done The Knowledge, of course, so finding his way through the foggy streets isn't a problem. Holmes pays him when they reach their destination and goes off in search of whichever ne'er-do-well he's pursuing. Meanwhile, the driver presumably sits around again, waiting for someone else to need his services. It's the perfect example of the nineteenth-century gig economy.

In 2020, the picture is slightly different – but not much.

I don't often use taxis myself, because I'm fortunate to live close to two bus routes. One of them is served by buses from Aberdare to Merthyr Tydil (via Llwydcoed) and back again, which run half-hourly until about 6 p.m. The other route has buses 'up to every 10 minutes', running from Glynhafod variously to and from Merthyr Tydfil (via Hirwaun), Penderyn, Glynneath, or Hirwaun itself. There are also buses to and from Cwmdare (hourly in each direction) until about 6.30 p.m. The last bus from Aberdare now departs at 2325 – a vast improvement on the previous 2230 service. I can now enjoy a full evening in the pub or a gig in Jacs without having to rush off early. And if it's a nice night I can always walk home. It's only when the gig overruns on a wet night that I resort to a taxi.

The only other times that I do call on a taxi (normally my pal Adrian) is when I'm travelling home from London. To my knowledge, the last bus to Hirwaun has connected with the last train from Cardiff just once – and that was only by accident, when it arrived in Aberdare nearly twenty minutes behind schedule. (I did Tweet Stagecoach at the time, pointing out that it would be a really worthwhile daily service, but they didn't reply.) As I'll have been out of the house for some eighteen hours by the time I arrive at Aberdare, slinging Adrian a fiver for a quick ride home, especially if it's pissing down, seems cheap at the price. I text him when the train leaves Pontypridd and he meets me outside the station. I'm home before midnight. The job's a good 'un.

In Cardiff, getting a taxi is easy. Dragon Taxis seems to have the city (and a wider area besides) pretty much sewn up. They operate 24/7, and their phone number is easy to remember. If you really can't remember it, it's in just about every phone box, in every shop window, in every pub, on every advertising hoarding and (of course) on the front and sides of every vehicle. Their fleet comprises some 1200 vehicles across much of South-east Wales, so you're pretty much guaranteed to get a ride within five or ten minutes. There are numerous one-man bands in the city as well, of course, but if you've got Dragon Taxis' number committed to memory (or stored in your phone), why would you resort to one of those?

In Aberdare, the picture is quite different, as a couple of friends and I found out three summers ago. We had booked a trip to London, which meant a very early start from Trecynon. And the afternoon before we were due to set off, it pissed down. The forecast was for heavy rain all night and into the early morning. We would have had to walk into Aberdare, because it was a Saturday and the buses don't start early on a 'non-working day'. (Shops and hospitals don't open at weekends, apparently.) It would have taken us fifteen minutes at least. We'd have been soaked before we even got to the station. So, sensibly enough, we decided to book a taxi for the following morning.

Between us, we had about a dozen numbers on business cards, all of whom professed to offer '24 hour service'. We took turns ringing them, but nobody was able to do a 6 a.m. pickup from Trecynon. Not one person. In the event, the rain had eased off by the time we left, so it wasn't a problem – but our experience exposed the lie of the '24 hour service'.

My cousin Katie and I once waited on the Cardiff Street (night-time) taxi rank for over an hour on a Sunday night (in the pissing rain, unsurprisingly) before a car turned up. Obviously, there's no demand for taxis on a Sunday night – just like early on a Saturday morning.

I was chatting to my friend Rebecca about this a few months ago. She'd had a similar problem a few days earlier, trying to get from one place to another outside 'normal working hours'. After ringing almost every phone number they knew between them, she and her friends were eventually able to find a driver who was a) working and b) available. Rebecca used to work in a pub. The board next to the bar is full of taxi cards. I bet she'd stored each new one in her phone just in case she needed to use it. And still she came up empty-handed.

Rebecca was a student in Swansea, where two companies, Yellow Cabs and Data Cabs, play much the same role as Dragon Taxis plays in Cardiff: two phone numbers, dozens of vehicles, 24-hour coverage of the city and beyond. I've just been looking at Data Cabs' website. They have mobile phone apps, smart cards, GPS locators in their vehicles, computerised dispatch systems and the whole shooting match. It's a twenty-first-century operation.

Here in the Cynon Valley, we're not much further on than Sherlock's cabbie.

Rebecca asked me why the dozens of one-man bands in and around Aberdare didn't get together under one banner – in the way that the city taxi firms have. I didn't have an answer for her. I suggested that some drivers might have started working for an old company (Roadrunner, for instance) before striking out on their own. When Roadrunner was in existence, the 24-hour service was a real phenomenon. There were enough vehicles and drivers to cover the entire day and night in shifts. You can't possibly offer a 24-hour service if you're one bloke in one car.

This became apparent to me a few weeks ago. It was a Saturday afternoon, and a group of us were in the National Tap in the centre of Aberdare. Alan needed to book a taxi for an hour hence. He rang everyone he had stored in his phone. Nobody had a slot available. I gave him the couple of numbers I knew, and he drew blanks again. Tony and Peter suggested some more numbers, and eventually – on maybe the tenth call – Alan got a result. It wasn't even a Match Day, when you'd expect demand to be higher than normal. The Six Nations fixtures had been cancelled that weekend, so we were just having a nice couple of pints in town.

A few years ago I was walking through Aberdare and I noticed a long line of taxis stacked up at the daytime rank in Duke Street. It's a great spot, just a few metres from the bus station and within easy walking distance of the shops. Punters stroll up and the first driver on the rank gets the fare. Everyone else in the queue shunts up one place to wait for the next punter. In the meantime, they stand around chain-smoking, chatting to the other drivers, drinking tea and reading the paper. Sound familiar?

Out of interest, I walked from one end of the line to the other. The rank itself can accommodate about six vehicles at a time; the rest line up through the car park until they reach the entrance from Duke Street itself, then go further back into the car park. I counted over twenty cars, almost entirely independent operators, all stacked up with no place to go.

So, let's assume that punters come along at three-minute intervals. At the end of an hour – assuming he hasn't had a phone call enabling him to break off and head for a pickup – the last man on parade has spent a lot more on coffee and fags than he's earned in that period.

In fact, he's earned precisely nothing in one hour on the rank.

He still needs to buy petrol. He still needs to tax his car, and insure it, and pay for the MOT, and keep it in good running order. He still needs to pay the fee for his Hackney Carriage licence. That's without the initial costs of the driving licence, DBS check, BTEC qualification … Sure, he probably makes up the business on a Friday or Saturday night. A lot of drivers don't work weekends. I assume they make their money on school runs instead.

It's not as though working off the rank is particularly lucrative anyway, as I discovered a few days ago.

On 20 March – or, as it'll be forever known in my lifetime, Black Friday (the day the pubs closed) – I decided to help the other regulars at the National Tap drink the bar dry. This necessitated missing the last bus home. Instead, I went for a taxi at the end of the night. There were about half a dozen cars parked up in Cardiff Street, and I observed the protocol by getting into the first one. The driver wasn't a local chap, judging from his accent, but he knew where I was going and dropped me off not far from my house before returning to town. Where he presumably went to the back of the queue and waited for the next punter, exactly as he would have done had he been working a day shift from Duke Street.

The following day I realised that my phone had slipped out of my pocket during the journey. Now, here was a problem.

If I'd been in Cardiff, I'd have able to ring Dragon Taxis straight away and report the lost item. They would have been able to track down the driver through GPS and their dispatch logs, get in touch with him by phone, and my property and I would have been reunited quickly and painlessly. If I'd been in Swansea, I'd have been able to do the same. But this is Aberdare, with Goddess knows how many possible contenders to work my way through.

A friend of mine tried ringing it, but it went straight to voicemail. That's understandable. If I were driving a car and someone else's phone (in the glove compartment or, possibly, under the passenger seat) started ringing, I wouldn't be able to pick up. And with the lock code activated and the power saving mode in operation, I wouldn't be able to look at the call log afterwards and ring the caller back.

At lunchtime on the Monday, I tried using Google Maps to trace my phone's whereabouts. (It's an Android phone so this works by default.) I had to walk into town to use the free Wi-fi hotspot near the library because the library itself was closed, of course. The tracking system had 'seen' my phone at Duke Street, just half an hour earlier. I stopped at a payphone to try ringing it again, but needless to say it was out of order. I walked to the rank, where there were five vehicles touting for business. I asked each driver if they could help me, but none had worked on the Friday night. The car with my phone in it was off on its travels again.

However, I was able to turn back on the clock on the timeline. Now I knew where my phone had stayed overnight – not far into Aberaman. That was a decent start. I bought a cheap phone from Tesco and called a few drivers I knew – Paul, Steve, Pat, Maria. I knew none of them had taken me home, but I hoped they might know a driver living close to where my phone had been. Paul gave me another couple of numbers to try. I drew a blank with those as well.

A Facebook post got me slightly closer to the target. My friend Dan suggested a guy he delivers takeaways to. I took a stroll down on the Thursday and popped a note through his door, hoping for the best. But he didn't get in touch with me, so I was on the wrong lines.

Last week, I decided to bite the bullet and take another walk to Aberamam. I wrote out notes asking if anyone knew a taxi driver living in or around their street. I asked if they could call my (new) phone, and popped one through each letterbox in the street where my phone had been 'seen' on the Friday/Saturday.

I'd only just got back to town when I had a call from an elderly gentleman living in the street. He knew two taxi drivers living nearby – and one guy had the same name as had been suggested by another Facebook contact. He gave me the number, and I texted the guy a message. (I didn't try calling in case he was on the road, which would have taken us back to square one.) Soon afterwards the guy called me back. He did indeed have my phone. He drove up five minutes later and dropped it off. He's a nice chap, and I believe he was born in Portugal – I told you he wasn't local, didn't I?

I've now got his number for future reference. But I wouldn't have it by any other means. I don't have his card, and it isn't displayed on the exterior of his vehicle. I don't know how he does business ordinarily, other than by sitting on the rank and hoping for the best. But I think it's safe to say his Saturday itinerary wasn't particularly productive.

He's gone from Aberaman to Duke Street, then variously to Tesco, St John's Church, a couple of stops in the side streets of the town centre, and back home again. Let's say each journey made him £4 (the fare to my house). How much has he actually earned during eight hours on the road?

This whole rigmarole got me thinking about the potential for taxis to operate under one brand name serving the entire Cynon Valley, all the way from Ystradfellte to Ynysybwl, from Cwmdare to Cefnpennar.

Imagine if there was one landline number – simple to hum and easy to remember – which would connect to you to a high-tech office, equipped with modern technology and staffed by people who knew the area and had good customer service skills. (Not just mumbling 'Hello, taxis' when they pick up the phone, for instance.) Imagine if you needed to book a taxi at 5.30 on a Saturday morning, and the person at the other end of the phone said, 'Yes, no problem.' Imagine if one or two drivers could station themselves (no pun intended) outside the railway stations in Abercynon, Mountain Ash, Penrhiwceiber, Fernhill and Cwmbach just before a train from Cardiff was due to arrive. Imagine if you were in Hirwaun late on a Sunday night (it has happened), knowing there was a driver on his way to the village who could pick you up on the return leg. Imagine …

Well, I don't need to spell it out in any more detail, do I? Suddenly all that wasted time in Duke Street or Cardiff Street vanishes as each driver responds in turn to the incoming calls. Every driver can be active throughout the day, with the increased revenue from each of them contributing to the business as a whole. Instead of forty or so people each having to keep their own business records, pay their own accountants' fees and do their own self-assessment at the end of the year, the office would handle everything centrally. The travelling public could bin pockets full of business cards (some of which are probably defunct by now) and kiss goodbye to making a dozen fruitless phone calls before striking gold. Everyone stands to gain, as far as I can see.

It's funny what goes through your mind when the pubs are shut on a Sunday afternoon, isn't it?