Taxi passengers in Aberdeen have been forced to wait more than an hour in the middle of the night for a vehicle, as a driver dearth caused by the Covid pandemic begins to bite.
The several lockdowns in 2020 and 2021, when venues such as pubs and clubs were closed and people were discouraged from travelling away from home, caused a crisis for Scotland’s taxi drivers.
In the Granite City, many of them left their jobs and found work elsewhere, while others went into retirement.
As a result, the fleet has reduced by around 25% since the beginning of 2020, with a particularly noticeable impact on people returning home after weekend nights out when public transport has stopped running.
Families and other travellers at Aberdeen Airport have also recently had to queue for more than an hour following the departure of the final 727 bus at midnight, with around two taxis arriving every twenty minutes.
Russell McLeod, the managing director of Rainbow City Taxis, said: “The impact is probably more significant to the night-time ranks and especially at weekends.
“It means customers wait in the ranks a bit longer than they did pre-Covid.
“We want to be proactive in recruiting drivers, but we’ve got standards and we need to keep those standards up.”
Rainbow City, along with the city’s two other main firms Aberdeen Taxis and ComCab, has asked for help from Aberdeen Council to make it easier for them to get more people in their driving seats.
On Tuesday, councillors on the licensing committee were asked to consider reducing the pass rate for the four sections of the taxi driver knowledge from 75% to 60%, and changing the rules to allow a candidate who only failed one or two sections to resit without having to take on the parts they had already passed.
The companies also asked that the test for private hire drivers remain the same as for taxi drivers, as “they are doing the same job”.
Russell said: “There’s probably enough people taking it, the problem is passing it.
“All three offices operate the taxi school, which is effectively teaching the streets of Aberdeen and helping them pass the knowledge test.
“All of us who have taxi schools are all operational, they’re all very well attended at the moment, we just need a bit of help to get more people through.”
What is in the Aberdeen taxi driver test?
At the heart of efforts to recruit more taxi drivers in Aberdeen is the four-part knowledge test all candidates must take.
Part one covers the city’s streets, with 20 questions in which the wannabe drivers are given a road and must say which others it connects to.
Part two centres around points of interest in Aberdeen, asking where landmarks such as St Machar’s Church, Soul Bar, Duthie Park and the Chester Hotel might be found.
In part three, candidates are given two locations and must name all the streets they would take to get from A to B in the most convenient way possible.
And part four is simply a test of their knowledge of the Highway Code.
What are the next steps for the council?
At Tuesday’s meeting of the Licensing Committee, councillors agreed to press forward with a public consultation on several options for changing the approach to the knowledge test.
Those options are:
- Changing the test for private hire drivers so it examines their knowledge of the city at “a more general level”
- Abolishing the test altogether for private hire drivers
- Allowing candidates to resit only a single section of the test for a reduced fee if they passed the other parts, rather than making them resit the entire test
- Require drivers to get an SQA qualification on taxi or private hire driving as well as passing the knowledge test
Council licensing solicitor Sandy Munro said: “We absolutely want the trade’s views but I think it’s important to get the general public’s perspective on this as well.
“There may be people who are being put off joining the trade because of the standards or because of the current layout of the test.”
New plans to increase taxi driver numbers in Aberdeen could ‘seriously damage’ standards
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