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COST OF SURVEY SOARING
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12:00 - 05 April 2005
The cost of carrying out a survey into whether Plymouth needs more taxis has increased by more than £2,000 after consultants under-estimated the time it would take to monitor ranks.

Consultants were brought in last year to monitor demand at Plymouth's taxi ranks as part of a survey to see whether Plymouth needs more hackney carriages.

The city council licenses black cabs but, like nearly half of all councils, restricts the number of licences. Plymouth's limit is 359.

Councils are able to restrict the number of licences if they are satisfied there is no significant unmet demand, but now the Office of Fair Trading is urging the authorities to reconsider the policy.

The rank observations form part of this survey.

Consultants originally quoted for the 11 most used taxi stands being observed for 36 hours, with 30, less popular stands being monitored for eight hours each, giving a total of 636 hours.

But when consultants came to carry out the work, they found that additional ranks had been installed and that some needed additional monitoring.

This meant they spent an additional 148 hours monitoring the stands, resulting in an extra charge to the city council of £1,990 plus VAT.

The consultants decided that some stands needed more than eight hours' monitoring to give 'a more robust survey, should any decision be challenged'.

The additional hours were spent at hackney carriage stands in the city centre where trade can be greater by day or by night, or by week or weekend.

For example, the consultants decided to increase the time they spent monitoring the Union Street stands at the junction with Derry's Cross from eight hours to 20 hours so that it could be observed during the week and at weekends, because the level of demand fluctuates.

Extra time was spent watching stands at Lisson Grove, in Mutley Plain, Royal Parade, Mayflower Street, Exeter Street, Mill Street, Saltash Road, Whimple Street, Derry's Cross and Western Approach.

Three additional stands not in the initial survey - Cornwall Street West, the Parade, at the Barbican and in Union Street at the Dance Academy - were also monitored.

well I will volunteer to sit in a bar at the Barbican on a summers day and count taxis.

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A member of the Hire or Reward Industry

All of this just goes to show what a [edited by admin] poor effort Jacobs did in Liverpool.

They surveyed Liverpool for the grand total of 143 hours, yet Plymouth with a population of 200,000 less than Liverpool, and with a thousand less cabs, surveyed more than 600 extra hours.

As I said about the Liverpool survey, well iffy.

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IDFIMH

So we even get details of the rank observations in the Plymouth press.

Next they'll be explaining the multiple regression methodology used

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Taxi Driver Online
www.taxi-driver.co.uk

of course the local drivers haven't had wind of this at all and are not overloading those ranks on purpose?

I wish someone would.

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IDFIMH

Linear regression isn't difficult.

Say you have two statistics that are related to each other, for example the faster you go, the more fuel you use.

So say you found some figures saying:

Speed 40 50 60

Mpg 50 45 40

You can use a formula to work out another formula that will give you the mpg at speeds that you haven't measured.

With the SUD surveys, you can use measures of unmet demand from observations in the various towns and cities, and link that to the number of taxis.

So you can construct a formula that relates the amount of SUD to the number of taxis, adjusting for population and the like, and once you have measured the amount of SUD you can use the formula to calculate the 'proper' number of taxis.

But it's complicated because there are more than two factors to take into account, so they use multiple regression rather than linear regression, and the former is a bit more difficult to understand that the latter

At least I think that's a broad outline of how they do it, but as it's not really explained in the reports, it's not that easy to know exactly what they're doing.

But since those reading the reports usually haven't a clue anyway, explaining the methodology fully would be a complete waste of time.

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Taxi Driver Online
www.taxi-driver.co.uk

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IDFIMH