Is the UK the only place to have private hires and hacks? Whenever ive been abroad a taxi is a taxi !
Here in Glasgow the Private Hires have a sticker on the door for pre - booked only and apparently theres a 6 year age limit on them . Never seen anything referred to hackney carriage in scotland .
Generally only Edinburgh and Glasgow have black hacks .
Glasgow appears to have more PHs than Edinburgh .
We had a few running around Elgin for a time - a couple of Metrocabs and an ageing Fairway. When I worked for one of the larger cab firms in Aberdeen there were "London" cabs in the fleet, but they were fairly few in number.
At the time Aberdeen had three different types of licence (it has been some time since I worked there so things may have changed)
- Hackney (Yellow plate): can be hailed on the street
- Private Hire (Red Plate): pre-book only and can use bus lanes, although it used to be the case that they could only do this when they had a PoB (Passenger on Board). This I believe has changed, probably because they carry plate numbers on the front now as well as the back
- Airport (Green plate): permitted to pick up at the rank at the airport only - anywhere else they function as a normal private hire and have to be pre-booked
All were fitted with standard meters. There was a requirement that any
new hackney licences could only be issued to wheelchair accessible vehicles, mostly Ford Galaxy/VW Sharan and the Peugeot Euro7 was also becoming popular at the time. However, any existing hackney licence holder could continue with a regular car.
I seem to recall there was a bit of a stramash when the city council proposed that they wanted all taxis to be yellow. They did introduce a standardised roof sign, though.
I quite enjoyed working there as a team leader in the call centre, but I was also trained up to fill in as controller to cover breaks and absence; I used to dread any of the regular control staff phoning in sick!