PRIVATE HIRE PROVISION
Plate surveys can identify how active the current hackney carriage and private hire fleets are and also demonstrate how many out-of-town vehicles are active in a particular place. This can help an authority know more effectively how serious the issue is and what the potential loss of trade and income to the local licensing authority might be. It can help show how the trade presently reacts to demand and when there might be shortage or excess of service.
Owner and Driver consultation can help elicit the views of the trade in a way that people feel able to give their honest thoughts and views. It can help understand driver concerns and operating practice clearly. It can identify if levels of violence are restraining service provision, what ranks are actually used, and lengths of operation and days of operation. Driver survey results can be combined with up-to-date driver number trends, to determine if the number of active drivers is stable, dropping or increasing. After all, no matter how many vehicles are licensed, they all need drivers, otherwise they are providing no service.
Key stakeholder consultation is perhaps the least responsive of the survey elements that can be used, but again gives people opportunity to feed back the level of service they consider they are obtaining from the local trade and express their needs for policy and service change. If stakeholders are complaining, this is a strong indicator that there are problems!
Collecting information from these four data sources is not particularly expensive and can provide real value to licensing officers and
PHTM SEPTEMBER 2023
licensing committees and help ensure that the needs of the public for licensed vehicles can be better understood and promoted and developed.
Rank surveys are a staple of the hackney carriage unmet demand surveys. These surveys
are
relatively expensive compared with the data sources identified earlier. However, these can significantly enhance understanding of patterns of demand and supply and ultimately, whether passenger needs are met or not, and if not, when not. They also demonstrate if the rank is adequately designed for present need and if other vehicles block the ranks and prevent usage by hackney carriages.
If the level of service offered by licensed vehicles in a locality drops, it can be difficult to turn this around. Any measures implemented to improve levels of service can take a long time to become effective. If reduced levels of service of licensed vehicles occur in conjunction with reduced bus service provision, especially in rural areas, this can present significant mobility and isolation issues to some rural residents.
Often prevention is better (and cheaper) than the cure. Checking that the local population is adequately served by licensed vehicles, within the wider public transport provision, can help with early identification of problems and offer an opportunity to address these problems. Ultimately, this fulfils the requirement of any regulator to ensure the public are adequately serviced and therefore protected, with a licensed vehicle service that delivers public benefit.
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