Taxi Driver Online

Urgent help required

OK guy's n gals i need some suggestions ASAP, for the last 18 years we have used fixed price zone to zone pricing, i have decided to change this when we go live with our new system and use mileage rates worked out by using our computer. The problem is we live in a very rural area with around 5% of our total workload coming from outside of our normal catchment area, which is approx within a 10 mile radius of our city centre.

It is the jobs that start and finish outside of our main catchment area that are causing me a serious problem, we never want to go to a pickup that is lets say 12 miles north of our city to a destination that is 13 miles also to the north and only charge the minimum fare. I was astonished to hear that many taxi company's who also price by the mile travelled simply turn down this type of work as it's not cost effective, my customers are used to paying a premium for us to go out of area to pick them up and I'm not prepared to turn down this work.

I thought i came up with a solution to this problem by charging a allocation fee/pickup charge for out of area jobs IE if i had to travel 12 miles to do a pick up and the trip finished only a mile or so away the price per mile charged would get an allocation fee/pickup charge added to the fare which would be around half the normal cost of a cab from the city centre to the pickup. This sort of works OK with the jobs up to about 8-10 miles away as hopefully we would have a car somewhere reasonably close by, but it certainly doesn't work when the pickup is further out of area. So what do you guy's do? or how have you resolved this problem?

I would imagine most firms pass on that kind of work to others, or say they can't do the job.

Clearly you have the option of a booking fee, or you can offer the punter the choice of waiting till you get a nearer car to their address.

But basically, as a driver, it doesn't appeal to me to run 12 miles for a job to take the punter a further mile from my area. Unless of course I can put the meter on from where I run from.

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IDFIMH

We tell them we will add a surcharge of, eg, £5 or £10 or whatever round number may equate to a little less than the metered run to the pick-up point.

This only applies to jobs which are 'out of borough to out of borough.'

If they are within the borough, at either end of the journey, we charge the normal fare, part of which may be a previously paid deposit for out of borough pick ups.

Another well known phrase for you. "if it ain't broken, don't fix it." If the old system has served you well for 18 years, why change it.

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Grandad,

I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a full written apology and guarantees. I do think you should tell them exactly what you want because at the moment they've got the threat of solicitors hanging over their heads so they aren't going to admit anything

With regard to the out of borough work the company I work for only charge from pick to destination with nothing added. We cover a decent area and drivers sit all the place. I think you need to discuss with the drivers what they want. Do they want to cover that work? Is it that valuable? Is it usually booked in advance or there & then bookings? With only 100 drivers approx. are you sure you are able to service these communities effectively without compromising customer service? If you decide to continue the service out of borough then I suggest you stick with what's been working for the past 18 years as grandad says "why fix it if it ain't broke". Another idea may be to employ a part time driver who actually lives in these areas to cover the work. Anyway good luck with it all

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Note to self: Just because it pops into my head does NOT mean it should come out of my mouth!!

Zone to zone pricing has indeed worked well for us, there's no doubt about that, the problem is that it sort of is broke/redundant now. The problem with zonal pricing is that whenever you have a price increase/decrease there are literally hundreds of thousands of zonal combinations to change as we also price multiples the same way. We have previously got around this by simply adding a percentage increase to the fares done through our system, unfortunately this overly exaggerated the fare increase for our longer jobs/out of borough work.

Auriga have been very busy getting our new system loaded up with lots of new stuff over the last 24 hours, this means that it's all hands to the pump at the moment. All day and night today, several of my staff including myself have been transferring our regular bookings, so far it's taken approx 30 man hours and i don't think we are even half way through them yet. We still have so many other things to do too, we are all having to do a lot of extra hours so that we will be ready in time for go live, which is now only 5 day's and counting away, and i still haven't sorted my pricing issues yet.........Doh

I can't stop myself from reminiscing at the moment, 15 years ago when we first went computerised at my office i didn't even have my own a PC, where would we all be now without our pc's? I didn't really know the first thing about computers back then but somehow i made them work for us....God only knows how! I remember go live with Sirius as if it were yesterday, i wish it was tomorrow, i wouldn't have bothered turning up.......LOL. When i removed my staff's pen and paper a few of them actually broke down in tears, i wasn't then, and am still not the right person to deal with crying girls, i just think WTF are you crying for, get on with it!

I'm a lot older and wiser now so all my staff will be much better prepared for our Evo go live next week, that's not going to stop them from worrying though. People are naturally afraid/weary of all things new, even though they know that deep inside it's probably the best way forward, there's always going to be a few hick up's but I'm really very positive about a great future for everyone that works for me. Personally I'm not nervous about the switch over at all, what i am a little surprised at though is that I'm starting to feel a little emotional about switching Sirius off for the final time, it'll be like losing a close friend. Four day's and counting till we all say goodbye to Sirius, hopefully i won't miss her too much.

I would imagine going from pen to Sirius was a lot more daunting than Sirius to Evo.

It will be a doddle.

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IDFIMH

I'm certainly hoping so, we've only got a couple more full day's left to find out after today.

I attended the funeral of one of my long term drivers today, he died at the age of 66 years old just under a year after retiring, he started driving for my company in 1994. Another recently retired driver and myself visited him in hospital about 4 weeks ago, we both knew then that he wouldn't be with us for much longer, rest in peace Frank (5).

The go live team from Auriga arrived at our office this morning, we've installed a second callback line ready for the Evo system, unfortunately they seemed to be having a few problems getting it to work correctly. Most of our drivers will be descending on the office in the morning to get their data units re-programmed, this needs to be done in the next 24 hours to enable them to be able to work after Wednesday which is when we go live.

My GM and myself stayed late tonight to get our mileage rates set up correctly, we also managed to come up with a solution to our out of borough pricing issues, if anyone is interested how we managed this i will post our solution on here. This had been our main problem for the last 6 weeks or so, i personally have had many sleepless nights trying to resolve this particular problem, we now just need to see if the theory works in practice.......watch this space for further details.

Tomorrow for me is the last chance i have to finish off any last gasp staff training, then it's down to my GM to oversee our go live on Wednesday morning, I'm going to be managing the night staff on go live day, i don't know who's got the worst job yet as the Auriga team will be present during the day shift. I'm going to bed now with my "Evo despatch" manual, this will be the first time i have read this manual!

Less than 36 hours till we switch off Sirius.

My office went live with our new system approx 24 hours ago, switch over came and went without any major drama, maybe i was expecting the worst but generally things went very well. This doesn't mean that i/we have nothing left to do, it actually feels like our work has only just begun as we now need to optimise the system so that it works the way we want it to, this means we have a lot of tinkering to do during the following day's/weeks.

I suggest you add years to your statement tele taxis of Dundee are still having problems ,the drivers are not happy with the system , i know teles are not happy with the after sales help.

You are 100% correct, it does take years of tinkering to get your system working exactly the way you want it to, things constantly change and that's why every system needs to be as flexible as possible. We never stopped making small adjustments to our previous system, we were constantly trying to make it work better for my staff and our drivers. It's the operators/managers that don't make these changes, or don't set them up right in the first place, that have these major problems.