Taxi Driver Online

Haha! Hey Toots, it's funny you should say that... Delta Taxis are the official sponsor of the play's sequel 'BRICK UP: THE WIRRAL STRIKES BACK.' It's on at the Empire Theatre next month, and follows on from where the first play left off, with the tunnels being bricked up and the Runcorn Bridge being destroyed. The sponsorship is part of a £25,000 campaign to support the arts for locally produced plays written by local playwrights, whilst raising the profile of our company in a positive and innovative way. We've also committed £42,000 to Bootle FC to help with a 3-years program to improve the ground and its attached facilities. Then there's the sponsorship of THE STIGLET, a young, local, up-and-coming GoKart racing driver.

There's also bimonthly visits our company mascot (Buzzy Bee) makes to Alder Hey with alternating control centre staff members, so we can distribute toys, sweets and gifts to the children in branded, eco-friendly kiddiebags. We raise over £6,000 a year for the hospital. Oh and don't forget the Jospice, we recently handed over our 1,000th collection box. And there's also the 15,000 branded ecofriendly shopping bags we have distributed to pensioners homes, supermarket customers, community fun days, jumble sales etc etc.

And there's the billboards, the A-Frame Trucks, the 358,000 postcards we deliver every 8 weeks. Then there's Control Centre improvements too. Never mind the tens of thousands of pounds spent on upgrades and new software developments, believe it or not we've spent over £25,000 this year just on staff training, across call takers, managers, IT workers, Engineers, admin staff etc etc. It's all worked out quite well though.. in a catchment area of approximately 750,000 people (Liverpool, Knowlsey and South Sefton) we now process 8.5Million bookings a year. That means that on average, every man, woman and child books a Delta roughly once a month. So far in 2010 Delta has increased its bookings by 10.5% on last year whereas many other companies have seen declines of up to 40%. Whilst we have managed to increase work by 10.5% our drivers have only increased 5.6% compared to last year. We're very strict as to who we allow on the system, and have rationed our drivers in a variety of ways to ensure that work increases at a greater rate than drivers.

Whilst we continue to get stick from the likes of our friend 'dagger' I notice that driving a taxi is still his chosen profession, and hiring a radio from Delta is his favourite way to do it... there's simply no better way to say 'DELTA, YOU'RE THE BEST FOR ME!'

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Don't knock it, 'til you try it....

Whilst nobody can take away the achievements of the Delta company I find the quote of 8.5 million calls per year somewhat bewildering

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

2005 - 4.5Million
2006 - 5.4Million
2007 - 6.3Million
2008 - 7.2Million
2009 - 7.6Million
2010 - Based on increase sustained from 01.01.2010 to 01.08.2010 we are on target to process 8.5Million bookings by the end of this year.

What's truly bewildering is the amount of hard work and expertise that goes into generating this extra business. Some drivers seem to think we just sit around whilst the work comes in on its own. If it was that easy every taxi company in the world would be doing it.

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Don't knock it, 'til you try it....

How many of those bookings are properly completed and how many drivers are there at Delta roughly?

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

The figures do not include bookings which are entered then cancelled before dispatch, or bookings which are entered, dispatched and then cancelled before arrival. But if a booking is entered, dispatched and the vehicle arrives at the pick-up location, our report counts it as a job even if the driver doesn't get mobile. So the figures do include no-shows (bogeys) which these days average between 2 and 3%. Our bogeys used to average between 4 and 5% many years ago but with better staff training and improved technology such as Ring On Approach and Screen-popping (where the CLI of the customer generates an on-screen address) we have been able to maintain the current low of 2-3%. Of course that average is misleading, as a driver working quiet days may do 20 jobs one day with not one bogey (0% rate) whilst a pub-and-club-night-driver might get 3 bogeys out of 6 bookings and go home with frustration (50% rate), but the average across the fleet is the one we use as a key performance indicator and that's currently 2-3%.

The same complication arises when looking at driver numbers (or jobs per driver). There's about 1680 drivers currently registered at Delta but typically 10% are off the road in any one week for holidays, illness, car trouble, disciplinary suspensions etc. Some of our working drivers with major financial commitments might batter the road at the most unsociable (and hence profitable) hours and take 200 jobs/week off the system. Some of our more senior drivers however (who haven't worked those kind of shifts for perhaps 20 years or more) are now pretty much semi-retired, with no mortgage left to pay, their car is paid for, their kids and grand-kids are all working. They can afford to pootle about of a daytime through the week and take only 50-60 jobs a week off the system. The range of work from one extreme to the other might leave the fleet with an average of 115 jobs/wk but that's not to say every driver does 115 jobs/wk.

Taxi drivers can either earn a decent living or work sociable hours, they can't do both! Some drivers (like Dagger) will no doubt fit their hours around their bread-winning wife. Unfortunately, we can't generate customers to the same timetable. Many of our drivers who started on nights then slipped onto days have found since the recession they have had to go back on nights again to make their money. A change in hours, a change in company, or even a change in local authority or working area, are always options for professional taxi drivers, whereas the same cannot be said for the many factory, construction and retail workers for example who simply woke up one morning without a job.

If, as 'Dagger' suggests, there is so much unrest amongst drivers for the poor return on their £85/wk circuit fees, then now might be the perfect time for them to start a nice little £50/wk co-operative of driver-focused owners... and instead of using market forces to encourage drivers to work when they're needed, they can all draw straws...

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Don't knock it, 'til you try it....

Ok let's do the math shall we:-

8.5 million jobs per year
365 days per year

that's 232,876.71 jobs per day. Which if every driver worked 24/7 they'd get approx. 138 jobs each. That would equate to almost 6 jobs per hour, per driver, per day working 24/7. If all those jobs were at the basic of £2.10 for the first mile then that's 289.80 per day or crudely estimated at about £12.00 per hour gross. Now we all know that drivers do not work 24/7. Also I've driven through Liverpool and Sefton on too many ocassions I've lost count and in the day time you get nowhere fast.

The stress levels of your drivers must be through the roof. What is Delta doing to combat that? I'd be very pleasantly surprised if they are doing anything at all. The problem PH drivers have is with no controls and no restrictions the availability of drivers is such that the companies don't need to worry if a couple of drivers leave ocassionally because they are easily replaced. Is it any wonder that the PH companies are concerned at the length of time it may take to train a driver should such proper training ever be put in place.

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

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IDFIMH

LOL you need a new calculator toots

CC

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Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
George Carlin

Probably, but, my mind is on other things at the minute. What can I say

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

It was only one point out. There's no need to be so dramatic ffs

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

Ok recalculated

It works out at 13/14 jobs per driver per day and that can't be good either if the start rate is £2.10 ffs.

If you average it out at 26 jobs per shift of 12 hours which is the norm nowadays that's only just over 2 jobs an hour, that's not good either. When some of our drivers did a daily break down of costs they had to earn £30 - £35 per day before they earned anything they could call thiers and that didn't include any Hp costs for vehicles.

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

I hope you don't mind if I correct your statement, for many years before 2002 the taxi trade had been objecting to the continuous increase in licence fees... and had been pushing for them to be ring-fenced.... eventually the delta joined in.... which was appreciated..... and I also hope you don't mind if I state the obvious.... you seem to be blowing your trumpet regarding all your good works...... but I failed to see anything relating to your drivers... retirement scheme....

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Justice for the 96. It has only taken 27 years...........repeat the same lies for 27 years and the truth sounds strange to people!

Double?? Your figures show Liverpool at approx. £95 and Sefton £62, how can that be double? Your arithmetic is almost as bad as Toot's

Anyway, I wasn't for a minute suggesting that economies of scale were the only factor, because it was self-evident that there was no precise correlation between licence numbers and licence fees, which would have been the case if economies of scale were the only factor.

But you don't have to be a statistician to realise that there is some relationship between total licence numbers and licence fees over the six areas, and economies of scale are the elephant in the room, since you're comparing areas with nine hundred licences to others with up to seven thousand.

By the same token, the analysis doesn't take any other factors into account that might influence fees, so to conclude that it's all down to SMBC efficiency is surely far too crude.

And it's also a bit naive for a licencee - particuarly such a dominant one - to produce such an obviously fawning analysis addressed to those doing the licensing, in my opinion at least.





Of course I've heard of misappropriation of funds, but how could I choose to ignore something that's neither explicit nor implicit in your analysis?

If someones stealing then what's being done about it?

And here you're actually undermining your own analysis and underlining what I said above about other factors which may influence fee levels.

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Caledonian Cabbie

Best deal in the country?

Musht be shum mishtake?

And perhaps rather than 'slagging of a berating' dagger is perhaps making the point that to describe a council complying with its legal duties as a 'magnificent achievement' is a tad OTT?

I'm not decrying SMBC's achievements but, as I said earlier, the tone of your letter just doesn't seem appropriate somehow.

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Caledonian Cabbie

So don't the kind of factors outlined here sort of undermine your analysis of the fees? You don't know if you're comparing like with like until you analyse what you're getting for your money.

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Caledonian Cabbie