Communal cabbing: apples and oranges

During the recent Tube strike here in London, BBC News Magazine ran an interesting article on 'communal cabbing'. But I wasn't sure about this paragraph:

The black cabs are taking up to five passengers per trip - compared with the average of 1.5 - and the more efficient use of capacity means more efficient queues.


To me, this seems a case of apples and oranges. After all, don't black cabs take "up to five passengers per trip" even when people aren't cab-sharing? And while the cabs ordinarily take an average of 1.5 passengers per trip, how has this figure changed a result of cab-sharing? The article doesn't say, so it's rather difficult to gauge the true impact of TfL's 'Fixed Fare Taxi Share Scheme'.

2 comments:

Apus said...

What struck me about the coverage of the tube strike was that the national media failed to meet the journalistic standard enforced on the trade magazine where JD and I toiled together.

There were quotes aplenty from tube management and politicians (notably London mayor BoJo) condemning the strikers but no balancing quotes from the RMT union, nor any explanation of what the strike was about (pay, conditions, redundancies and allegations of bullying but I had to go to the BBC website to find that out).

The RMT also alleged that an ACAS-brokered deal was scuppered at the last minute by BoJo.

Forgetting the rights and wrongs of the dispute, I know that had such an unbalanced report landed in the Engine Room inhabited by JD and his colleagues it would have been bounced PDQ.

JD (The Engine Room) said...

On a similar note, lots of publications made a great song and dance over tube drivers getting 43 days' annual holiday – without necessarily mentioning that eight of them were for bank holiday working and five of them were for Saturday working.

By my maths (and if I haven't misremembered the figures), that takes tube drivers down to 30 days' annual holiday. Generous, perhaps, but not out of the ordinary.