h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

One of the latest additions to the UK’s endangered species list is the London Cab. This shiny black creature inhabits one large urban area in the South East of England, but it’s under threat from an invasive pest from the West.

We’re talking taxis, of course. London’s licensed cabs are heavily regulated in terms of how they operate. Drivers have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the road network across the capital, with this qualification - ’The Knowledge’ - gained over many years of study. When you get into a black cab, you have an ambassador for London driving you around. They love the city and will give you any advice you need to make your stay a pleasant one. They’ll also, if you want, tell you their favourite anecdotes “You’ll never guess who I ‘ad in the back of the cab this morning…”. You can also rely on the standard prices for a journey.

The trouble is that they are rapidly being replaced by unregulated private hire vehicles - over 87,000 at a recent count. They use the Uber software app to pick up fares, but as they can pick them up almost instantaneously, this is in effect ‘hailing a cab’. They should be regulated in the same way as the black cabs, but they’re not. You also don’t get good background checks on these minicab drivers - they’re not a safe option for women travelling alone.

And so the Cabbies have been staging industrial action, generally through congregating en masse at some point in London and so stopping all traffic for a few hours. It’s caused me some inconvenience - I’ve had long walks from the office to the station, but I don’t mind it at all - they deserve support. I’ll make a point of walking where they congregate and talking to the drivers, or showing thumbs up. If they don’t fix this unfair regulation, we’ll lose the black cabs very very soon.

The black cabs are an institution. Save them!

We call unregulated cabs 'jitneys' over here.

The story of taxis in Dublin is interesting. Up to 2000 they were highly regulated; few or no new taxi plates (licences) were issued, and they changed hands at gigantic prices. Taxis were desperately rare on the streets and, even when booked by phone well in advance, not always reliable.

It was a regular sight: revellers after midnight huddled around empty taxi ranks in the city centre.

With deregulation, all changed in the twinkling of an eye. Taxis flooded onto the streets. You only have to scratch your nose and one will screech to a halt beside you.

Just last month a group of old-school taxi drivers lost a court case they had taken against the government and Dublin City Council, on the grounds that overnight deregulation had wiped out the value of their taxi plates.

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/courts/high-court/taxi-drivers-lose-high-court-case-over-deregulation-of-industry-1.2394523

Uber is getting to be unpopular here in Boston, though that doesn't help cab drivers in London.

Yes, The Knowledge is a fine thing indeed...

One time I was in London my family and I were booked a private hire cab for a trip and when the driver arrived he asked for a postcode for his satnav. We only had the street name and a letter from the company that we booked the trip through, but the letter contained the company postcode - in York. It was surprisingly hard to convinve the driver that the York postcode wasn't useful, but we just about managed, and somehow got to the right place... It was much easier getting back to the station, as the black cab driver didn't need satnav.

[Amy P]