Ordeal of getting home after a night out hasn’t changed

CARDIFF has changed immeasurably over the past 20 years and mostly for the better.

It’s taken its place on the world stage and hosts major sporting occasions with aplomb.

But I was shocked and a bit saddened to see that one aspect has not changed: the sheer ordeal of getting a taxi home after a busy night.

I know the city’s taxi drivers do a fine job under testing circumstances a lot of the time. They get abuse and hassle most of us simply would not accept at work. But why does it seem that there’s still not enough of them?

After the Anthony Joshua fight last weekend people queued for hours to get a taxi home. Engineering works in the Severn Tunnel which stopped some trains made it worse, but should it have been that bad?

Those who were stuck in the queues said fights broke out and visitors from other cities were saying they’d never come back. That’s not an image Cardiff can afford to project.

It brought to mind a very similar experience I had with my friends in Cardiff following a boxing match just over 20 years ago.

It was September 1995 and Cardiff’s Steve Robinson was taking on Prince Naseem Hamed at the Arms Park. We’d gone out clubbing, probably not realising the fight was on, and we lived to regret it.

We never wore bulky coats even in the coldest of weather because most places didn’t have anywhere you could put them and those that did charged money and you’d be stuck in a huge queue at the end of the night trying to get your coat back.

So we were in flimsy outfits and when we emerged from the Astoria or whichever club we’d been in, it was like there’d been a taxi apocalypse and the black and white hackneys had been wiped off the face of the earth.

Back then there were no night buses or we’d have been laughing and Uber hadn’t been invented. Taxis were your only option. The rank we used was at the Queen Street end of Park Place and we joined the end of the long queue in the early hours – maybe 2am, I can’t remember.

What I do remember vividly though is that it was freezing and one taxi would appear every 40 minutes or so to pick up the people at the head of the queue and drive off again. It was painful.

I can’t remember why we didn’t ring any parents and ask to be rescued because that would have seemed sensible.

We just waited and debated where else we might get a taxi. But leaving the queue and losing our place was too much of a risk. We knew that the taxis were coming, even though they were scarce.

Hours went by and by the time we were nearing the head of the queue we must have been almost hypothermic. It sounds exaggerated but a couple of the girls slumped in a doorway trying to get warm while a couple of us kept our place. I was seriously concerned about my friend in the doorway who was starting to fall asleep.

There weren’t such things as street pastors in those days so no-one was going to come along and give us space blankets to keep us warm. The queuing lasted longer than the night out and sapped every last drop of enjoyment out of the evening.

Eventually it was our turn to get a taxi and we made it home at about 6am. My mum got up and I told her what had happened and I was so cold I got straight into bed and she piled layers on top. It was ages before I got warm though. New Year’s Eve was always a nightmare too and we’d end up starting the walk out of town along Newport Road in the drizzle trying to flag down a taxi. We’ve also made deals to share cabs with total strangers while we queued. Nights like that put paid to my clubbing days by my mid 20s because I just couldn’t stand the ordeal of getting home any more.

I’ve no idea how easy or hard it is to get a taxi on a normal Saturday night these days, I wouldn’t like to try.

But considering Cardiff does so many thing so very well, this is something fundamental that is letting the city down.