Withy grove taxi rank

Due to road works for Metrolink’s Second City Crossing Manchester City Council will introduce a new temporary taxi rank on Withy Grove from Wednesday 18 December. This taxi rank will replace the existing site on Corporation Street which will close in January 2014.

Changes to northern rail services at manchester victoria
Thursday 26 December 2013 – Wednesday 1 January 2014

From Thursday 26 December 2013 – Wednesday 1 January 2014 Northern Rail trains will not be able to run into and out of Manchester Victoria station.

Services to the west of Manchester will start and terminate at Salford Central, or will be diverted to Manchester Oxford Road.
Services to the east of Manchester will be replaced by buses between Manchester Victoria and Rochdale/Stalybridge.

Metrolink services will continue to operate from Manchester Victoria during this time, except on Christmas Day.
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Nationwide, Phone Apps.

Comment:
An interesting look at how Phone apps aim to capture most of the Taxi markets. When the National PH license comes next year, will this happen all over the UK. ?

OK, so out in the small towns someone setting up as an Uber driver will indeed be eating into the traffic and thus the revenues of the local cab driver. But the vast majority of cabs are in the big cities. And they almost all use a system of medallions to limit the number of taxis that can operate. These medallions can be fabulously expensive: in NYC currently they cost around $1 million. You’ll not be surprised to find that people who can make a $1 million investment are not found behind the wheel of a cab in the Bronx. Instead those get rented out to a driver for perhaps, as Felix says $75,000 a year. That’s a big bite out of the potential revenues from doing a 12 hour shift looking for fares.

So, along comes Uber, Lyft or any of the other services. They do not have this cost. So, if those new services were to be the same price as a cab ride, or even if they’re cheaper than one, there’s still room for the drivers to make more money than the cab drivers. At which point our old friend, the rising demand for labour comes in. When the demand for labour does indeed rise then, as Karl Marx himself pointed out, in the absence of there being a reserve army of the unemployed then the wages of labour will rise. For the capitalists are now competing between themselves for the profits that can be made by employing that labour and they will thus bid up wages.

Uber can and does offer better incomes than the cab drivers get who are having to pay that $75k a year rent for the medallion. And it’s going to be a reduction of the rent on that medallion that is going to be the equalising factor that raises cab drivers’ wages again. For rise they will have to or they’ll obviously all go off and work for Uber or Lyft instead.

And there’s no doubt at all that this will happen. We’ve seen exactly this happening in Chinese manufacturing wages this past 15 years. As the world has turned to China to do the manufacturing for it then the demand for labour has soared. So much so that manufacturing wages have risen from some $1,000 a year to $6,500 a year in only a decade and a half. Simply and purely because there are now more capitalists wanting to exploit that labour, the competition to make the profits from that exploitation has raised wages.


http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/12/12/how-lyft-and-uber-will-raise-taxi-drivers-incomes-not-lower-them/?
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