Taxi Driver Online

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All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.
George Orwell, "Animal Farm"

But an owner driver, or indeed any self employed person is doing it as a business not to have PAYE employment, if they want £60K a year PAYE they need a very rare decent job, and unless your gonna put tacho's in taxis and invoke driver hour regs they will continue to keep taking money till the money dries up, thats the very nature of the beast

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Of all the things ive lost, i miss my mind the most

No, its an OPPORTUNITY

and any Owner driver will have to invest and run the car, theres not much difference between buying and renting

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Of all the things ive lost, i miss my mind the most

There is, NO, OPPORTUNITY in working 60-80 hours a week to eke out a living. Nor is there OPPORTUNITY in shelling out £400 a week to do a job. Renting yourself to an owner or selling yourself to the council, is almost the same thing. Your “investment” if that’s what you want to call it, owns you. You are signing up to wage slavery, where everyone owns a piece of your ass, except you. And that's what driving a taxi really means.


Get a grip, ffs…

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All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.
George Orwell, "Animal Farm"

There has been a lot of flap recently that the likes of Addison Lee are going to take over the PH world. It has been mentioned that they will employ drivers on £8-12 an hour. Or something like that.

Now to many that will not meet their bills, or they like the idea of being self-employed and being able to work the hours and shifts they wish. One of those quite possibly is me.

However I know plenty of drivers that will snap off the hands of someone offering to supply a licensed vehicle, and have holiday and sick pay, whilst paying the £8-12 an hour rate.

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IDFIMH

And that's exactly where your trade is now. The incentive to own your vehicle and to work your own hours just doesn't stack up. The overheads would choke a horse. You do not have the external economies of scale a major company has when finding work, employing people and buying and maintaining vehicles. A company can exist where an independent operator goes under. Unless of course, you can find ways of cutting your overheads or increasing your hours or to work more productively. A company has to grow faster than its losses, and that's what usually happens when work is scarce. The independents go under, and the companies suck up their vehicles along with the drivers.

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All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.
George Orwell, "Animal Farm"

so, what is your recomendation? being an independent? independent of whom or what? you`re always dependent... all depends. if you`re 50/50 with the company you work as much as you can and always give 50% of your takings doesn`t matter how much you earn but you`ve no expenses so if you take £800/wk less ~£150 fuel then £325 is yours. good? bad? don`t know, depends what you looking for. renting a car, we know from previous posts. being an owner? best option? in my opinion the best option is being a taxi baron and renting cars to others there isn`t better option than finding payers these days.

I have to agree with omarek's post above! There's little money being a driver!

Running through my own figures, there isn't an easy answer. I can quote the figures for my own car, working for myself in a semi-rural area where there's often little business, no radio circuit etc. It depends also on the average speed you could hope to attain over a period, in my case a fairly high 23.5 mph. I'd suggest a town taxi average speed would be around 15mph if you're lucky. That way you can take your estimated or actual annual mileage, divide it by the mpg, that'll give you the hours you actually drive, loaded and empty.

In my case 35000 miles(take off say 2000 miles for private and non-productive trips), divided by 23.5 mph is drive time of 1361 hours a year, average weekly drive time of 27 hours. I know what our average mileage fare is, around £2 a mile loaded, so £1 a mile total. (We have a lot of dead mileage). So total income is say £30000, less overheads and fixed costs of about £8200, variable costs of about £4300 including fuel, leaves about £17500. Divide that by the drive hours (1361), gives an hourly take-home rate of £12.85 an hour, or £22 an hour all-in.

Work the figures backwards to double check, 1361 hours x £22 = 29920; compare that with the £30k, the figures are about right!

However, we don't have a radio to pay for; this could typically be £250 a week, so that adds another £13k a year to the fixed costs and overheads, so out of my £17500, minus £13000, I'd be left with £4500 a year, or £3.30 an hour! So to earn the magical £6 an hour, I'd have to drive 3 times as many hours to be worse off than driving 25 hours a week.

The fixed costs of my Skoda are about £6.5k, lease fee, insurance, taxi badge, ops licence, road tax, £125 a week!

If the op sends me some more detailed figures by pm, I'll happily run it through my spreadsheet.

There are levels of dependency just like there are levels of survival - working on the street, while maintaining and repairing your own vehicle or renting and working on a radio circuit for a company. Everything is relative. However, surviving in your market and having a reasonable standard of existence is a different matter. And there comes a point, where if you can’t find ways to cut your overheads or to work more productively, then working for a company might be your only fall-back position to surviving in your trade.

Recommendation: when you find yourself running out of hours and have trouble covering your costs and making ends meet, it’s time to get out. It means your market is on its ars* or find a way to expand faster than your losses by starting your own company and provide employment for people like yourself caught in the trap of working longer hours for less money and a lower standard of living. Think of it, like Wonga for taxi drivers, with you scoring a percentage of their hard earned to make a profit instead of wage.

I’m afraid those halcyon days of working your own taxi and knocking off early with a pocket full of cash, is long gone.

Btw, when doing your calculations you should always add in sick pay, holiday pay, pension, depreciation, etc. You might find when you add everything up, you are not that far in front of the guy working for the company without all the hassle of keeping his own vehicle on the road.

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All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.
George Orwell, "Animal Farm"

So you work out your figures based on your average MPH to arrive at your hourly rate and not how long your ass is sat in the cab doing feck all.

You guys sure know how to paint a pretty picture.

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All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.
George Orwell, "Animal Farm"

Why would you want to earn £6 per hour, that's below the minimum wage. Before anybody goes off on one telling me it doesn't apply to self employed I'm fully aware of that but it's at least a standard to base earnings on

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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 always ask anyone in any trade who tells me they are self employed and cant work it out, What was your bank balance on the 1st day of the month and the last, if its gone down you aint making enough

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Of all the things ive lost, i miss my mind the most

I had a slow day, Bank Holiday monday, sun was out, too many walking everywhere, no-one had to get to work...

I just hit what I wanted

and went home

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Of all the things ive lost, i miss my mind the most

I could always work out how much per hour it is sitting around. Luckily we work from home, 3 mins from the town centre so sit in the relative comfort of home during jobs. Maybe the only way to compare hourly rate IS to work it out on "drive time", not sitting around time. If every cabby worked THAT out, there'd be none of us on the streets!

Assuming 14 hours "on call" a day, 350 days a year, (we don't have holidays), is 4,900 hours. Divide £30,000 by 4900 hours and you get £6.12 an hour, less expenses, so well below minimum wage. But then a lot of bus drivers and lorry drivers don't get paid through their break.

That's more like it but holidays should be added in along with sick pay, pension and anything else you can think of. It is disingenuous to leave things out in order to increase your hourly rate, even if it is time spent sitting in the house, as you are still on call 14 hours a day and then some. The truth is, you are working far below the national minimum wage.

It's looking at things through rose-tinted spectacles that have a habit of coming back and biting you on the ass. And I can't help but notice that when comparing the earnings of drivers and owners, the owners have a habit of excluding benefits that employed people take for granted to justify their self-employed status.

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All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.
George Orwell, "Animal Farm"