Taxi Driver Online

Not sure what the numbers are as of December 2020, but the numbers as of March 2020 can be found below.

Taxi and PH driver/vehicle/operator numbers for every licensing district in England and Wales as of March 31st 2020

Press Release and Summary

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IDFIMH

Got to love this spreadsheet.

Shows that Wolverhampton have 47 PH vehicles for every 1000 people in their licensing district.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.u ... xi0105.ods

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IDFIMH

Don't know if these are new figures the DfT are producing, but if they were meaningless enough before then the cross-border thing maybe makes you wonder why they're producing them at all, unless they're simply trying to highlight the absurdity of it all.

Anyway, I've been looking at a slightly older spreadsheet with slightly different numbers on it for a couple of years now, just for looking up the odd figure that might be of interest.

But one annoying thing was that when you scroll down the columns, the headings disappear, so when you're near the bottom it's often not easy working out what each number is all about.

Which I thought was odd, because you can freeze the column headings so they don't disappear as you scroll down the spreadsheet. Couldn't be bothered looking up how to do it until now, but for anyone who doesn't know, it's really quite easy. If you're using OpenOffice, just click on the number 8 on the left of the spreadsheet. That should highlight the whole of row 8.

Then go to the Window menu, then select freeze. That should mean the column titles will stay at the top as you scroll down the spreadsheet, so it's easier to work out which number is which

Only thing is, you can't save it that way, so every time you open the spreadsheet you have to freeze the titles again. Which is presumably why the DfT haven't frozen them permanently.

(When I used Excel years and years ago, I think you could freeze the titles then save it that way, so the titles would still be frozen when you reopened it, but that doesn't seem to be an option with OpenOffice. Although it might be to do with the fact that the spreadsheet is read-only, so maybe you can freeze the titles, but you can't save it )

I agree the spreadsheet looks like the spotty new trainee has complied it.

And one has to wonder what the f*** was the point of complying it in the first place when the numbers will bear no resemblance to the numbers now or in the near future.

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IDFIMH

The idiots at our Council if the spread sheet is correct could not supply the DFT with the correct figures at that time.

I think the DfT stats have improved over the years. When I first started looking at them c. 2000 there were quite a few very obvious errors, or at least very misleading figures.

On the other hand, the way they're going now reminds me a bit of how the PHTM fare analysis was going for a while - they got to the stage where they were providing mind-numbing analyses of the numbers, but a lot of it seemed completely pointless, and you couldn't see the wood for the trees. Too much detail, overanalysed, or whatever. (Not sure if PHTM has dumped a lot of that stuff, but I don't pay too much attention these days.)

Same with a lot of the DfT stats now, by the looks of it. I mean, apart from the cross-border stuff in terms of vehicle numbers, they're also using population stats for each council area for their ratio figures. But this assumes that in terms of customer demand things are neatly divided by council boundaries, but as we know the reality isn't so neat and tidy, particularly in large urban areas encompassing several different council areas.

(Or as an economist might put it, the stats on both the demand-side (population numbers) and supply-side (vehicle numbers) can provide a totally misleading picture.)

Then there's other supply-side stuff like comparing an area with mainly singled cars against an area with mostly doubled cars.

And even that can change over time. When I started here there was just me and I think one other who didn't take on other drivers in their vehicle. Now I think singled motors are quite common.

So you can't just compare the number of taxis here to that 20 years ago and draw conclusions, because a lot of the cars are singled nowadays, but that wasn't the case back in the day.