Mind-altering impact of trying to travel by black taxi in the capital
There is still a species roaming the Earth that thinks cabs are “just for weddings and funerals”. It’s the kind of human animal, this, that tends towards the large pronouncement, the general prediction, and is perhaps a bit older, wiser, but generally known also to be somewhat thrawn.
The particular phrase above is loved and used with great relish by my mother-in-law, for example, a woman who celebrates her 90th birthday next year. My father, following close behind, prefers the more blunt “waste of money” because he thinks it’s foolish to order a cab if you own a car. And besides, if pushed, he can always ask someone as a favour to drive for him – or, if he’s in a city, he can walk.
When we were young my sister and I were always ferrying him and his friends back and forth to various bagpiping parties because this was in New Zealand where children are allowed to drive and we could pass our tests at 15.
He’s never been cab-minded, my father. Even now, when he’s out seeing friends and relatives across the length and breadth of Caithness, my sister still happily hops into the driver’s seat at the drop of a hat just like she did back then in “the olden days” as my children refer to our childhood, Merran flinging her homework into the back and memorising Latin verbs while my father and his friends sang canntaireachd all the way home.
How things have changed. We get cabs quite a lot now, don’t we? Even though we think of them as a bit of a treat, still we hail them down and book them for all kinds of reasons, and none of them that fancy.
Even the other night, back in Edinburgh from Dundee, laden down with bags of books and student work and provisions for supper, and fizzing with rage at the latest excuse for a taxi rank at Haymarket station – set so far away from the exit as to make the very idea of the convenience and pleasantness of a cab a nonsense – I was still of a mind to consider a black cab ride on to my evening ahead the most natural means of conveyance when time was short and my destination was calling.
But it wasn’t as simple as that. In fact, the other night saw me making a giant leap in the steps of cab-kind, landing fully and squarely in the mindset of our children’s generation where getting from A to B in the most networked ways possible comes from having been brought up in a globalised, digitised world.
Reader, I’ve changed. Now I see that my thinking, too, may as well have been nearing extinction. For there I was, laden down in an icy, lashing rain, clutching my supermarket shopping in one hand and trying to make arrangements to meet up with my daughter on my mobile in the other … walking on and on, following a family with their ageing mother on sticks, also peching their way towards an invisible taxi rank pointed somewhere into the future of a dark night and nowhere in sight … all the time further away from the station and my feet wet, my bags heavier, wondering what all that nonsense about the “convenience” of a taxi from the station was all about … when my daughter said: “Stop right where you are. I’ll be there in a second in an Uber to pick you up.”
Now I’ve never been behind the Uber thing. I admire cab drivers as a profession. Their knowledge of “The Knowledge”, their nifty maneuvering in heavy traffic, all those lightning three-point turns to get you out of a jam. They know what they’re doing and they’re good at it. It’s what Britain used to be all about. Doing things well instead of thinking about doing them cheapest. Yes, a black cab costs a bit more but you’re supporting a way of life when you take one that’s not all about zero-hour contracts and featureless workers whose job insecurity strips them of any dignity and individuality.
In fact when Ubers were banned in London I let out a cheer, because I could see they were going to kill off the iconic black cab altogether – and we’d be left with yet another iteration of a city that’s sold itself off, piece by piece, to the highest bidder, so that soon there’ll be nothing about it left to recognise that we once loved.
But this situation I was dealing with here – in fact the cab situation in Edinburgh altogether, especially at the stations and airport where the rules and regs have made actually getting into one nigh impossible – called for desperate measures. And when my daughter said, “don’t walk any further, mum. For goodness’ sake, a taxi is supposed to be easy. Stay right where you are and I’ll pick you up”, I did. I stopped. I put down my bags. And within a minute, exactly as she’d said, there she was in her Uber, a car that was warm and dry and, vitally, right there when I needed it. Off we went.
The cab situation in the Scottish Capital is dire, alright. And all the registered black cab drivers talk about it. How much trade they’ve lost with that beautiful, elegantly convenient rank of theirs at Waverley long gone and no one in their right mind – let alone the elderly and the infirm – able to make it all the way up to Market Street and the pitiful arrangements that constitute taking a cab at that station now. And the maze of health and safety issues around picking up and dropping off so that you’re never able, it seems, just to hail a cab down in the street, or say “leave me here at the kerb”. Taking taxis has become a palaver.
And that’s not all. Because the Uber driver was telling me about the alleged illegal black cab activity that’s going on in the city too, where great gangs of unregistered drivers are moonlighting on a single licence. “That’s what all the cash-only black cabs are all about,” he said. “Some of them worse than the most illegal mini-cabs.” He went on to describe how Uber has made the illegal mini cab junket a thing of the past.
He was a retired, professional driver, this nice man, who enjoyed the job, and thought it was a decent way to earn “a bit of extra money to help make ends meet” and who had empathy for the black cab companies but also thought they’d allowed themselves to become complacent. “Cuts in the councils and police mean they can’t be monitored in the way they once were, and they’ve let themselves be be bullied into operating in ways that aren’t helpful for their customers,” he finished. “They should have been able to keep fares down and police themselves. But their fares go up and up.”
By the time I’d got out with Millie at her granny’s, not only had my shoes dried out and the time that I’d thought I’d lost walking endlessly down Haymarket Terrace had been made up, but my daughter and I had caught up on the latest adventures of her student life and I’d undergone an evolutionary change.
Now I think until Edinburgh sorts out her black cabs I fear they’ll be in use only for those weddings and funerals after all. The rest of us will have found some other way to treat ourselves to a taxi ride home.