The Collar and the Cab

In an act of pure opportunist self-promotion and in the hope of selling some I am publishing some extracts from my new book The Collar and the Cab on this blog. There are 35 chapters so it will take a couple of months to offer a little from each. 

31
City Centre East – Call Lane at 2 a.m.

No account of my time in the minicab world would be complete
without some attempt to describe the scene in the centre of
Leeds when the bars and clubs began to disgorge their customers
before closing for the night, because this involved one of the
most bizarre rituals of minicab driving that was as compulsive
as it was frustrating. But first I need to explain a little about how
the minicab world worked in practice rather than in theory in
the early hours of the morning.
As I commented earlier the theory is that private hire cars
(as opposed to Hackney Carriages) invariably have something
like “Advance Bookings Only” written somewhere on the
vehicle, or, even more ominously, “Journeys only insured when
booked in advance,” whereas proper taxis can pick up anyone
who hails them in the street. Again in theory these rules are
enforced by employees of the council, or occasionally the police,
approaching vehicles and offering significant sums of money to
private hire drivers to take them somewhere, or perhaps trying
to hail them in the street. If the driver breaks the rules they will
be informed of their misdemeanour and warned of impending
prosecution and suspension of their licence. 
That’s the theory, but the practice is somewhat different.
There were more private hire firms in and around Leeds than
could be counted. I worked for the largest of these companies,
which had the advantage of offering a steady flow of work
around the clock; of course some hours were quieter than
others, but then the number of drivers working fell off too, so
for instance at 4 a.m. whilst there was only a trickle of work
there were not many looking for it, and it was still possible to
find enough to make it worth your while. There were a handful
of companies who did their best to operate rigorously within
the law, including a couple which, in numerical terms, could
compete with my outfit. Once you went beyond that top half
dozen firms, though, it was a very different story; most of the
rest were small operations – some even being literally one man
and a car – who had relatively little work that was pre-booked
or came through a switchboard, particularly outside of normal
waking hours. The drivers who worked for these companies were
generally not subject to a company code of conduct as we were
– the owner of the firm simply wanted to collect rent from his
drivers, and for that consideration would allow them to sport the
company logo on the side of the car and operate pretty much as
they liked. In practical terms this meant that during a night shift
they would have little or no work that came from their office, and
made a living by plying for hire or piracy. Plying for hire means
operating as a Hackney Carriage and picking up anyone flagging
them down in the street, and piracy involves waiting in an area
where one of the larger firms regularly has work and pretending
to be the cab that the customer has ordered. They could get away
with this for a number of reasons: Firstly, because most of the
general public don’t understand the distinction between Hackney
Carriages and private hire cars they remain unaware – in spite of
the warnings on the side of the car – that the driver is operating
not only illegally but also without insurance for the journey
involved. Secondly, in spite of occasional crackdowns and spot
checks by the licensing authority and police, in reality the latter
have no desire seriously to curtail the practice to a great degree.
The principal objective of the police at two or three o’clock in the
morning is to see everyone off the streets of the city centre and
away from the area to their homes. A successful night is one in
which no streets are spattered with bloodspots or vomit, no one is
arrested and they don’t suffer too much verbal or physical abuse;
one can hardly blame them. So to start checking the credentials
of all the private hire cars working is not only time-consuming,
but counter-productive to their main objective.


 So try if you will to imagine the hub of Leeds’s night life and
a thoroughfare named “Call Lane” at two o’clock in the morning.
Wide enough to take three or four cars abreast, about 200 metres
in length and, more significantly, a one-way street linked to the
infamous inner city loop system. Both sides of the road were
replete with drinking establishments, and many evenings saw all
of them bursting at the seams; moreover they all seemed to close
at about the same time.
The ritual would begin a few minutes before two o’clock with
a job on my datahead calling for a pick-up in Call Lane. On one
level my heart sank because I knew what I was in for but there
was also something oddly endearing about the ritual played out
in an entirely predictable fashion each night.
Arriving at the top of the street – if you could get into it
at all – you were confronted by the spectacle of anything up to
100 private hire cars of all shapes and sizes representing more
firms than you knew existed completely blocking the street in
a scarcely believable display of taxi-driving anarchy. It was the
automotive equivalent of lifting a manhole cover to investigate
your blocked drain only to find a very large pile of amorphous
excrement jamming the pipe. You were confronted with the
sight of drivers of dozens and dozens of private hire cars who
were operating illegally, looking just to pick up anyone willing
to step into their vehicles or to steal the fare of another cabbie.
They had, of course, arrived there a little earlier, and had no
interest whatever in allowing the legitimately operating cars
to pass through to pick up their fares until they had secured
one of their own – or, more likely, someone else’s. Those drivers
who were operating within the law and those who had managed
to persuade someone that they were actually the cab they had
ordered (even though the legend adorning the car was different
from the name of the company they had called) now found
themselves stuck somewhere in the middle of the drainpipe and
unable to move. The only means of clearing the drain was to
apply pressure to those who were still causing the blockage by
the enthusiastic and energetic use of the car’s horn, which was
perceived to act as a kind of plunger.