Hours on the Rank : A Question for Cab Companies.
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The increasing ratio of "hours on rank" to "total hciirs out " has clearly become a disquieting factor in the motorcab problem. Time was, during the summer of 1.907, when a motorcab driver seldom had the opportunity, let alone occasion, to take tip his turn on the rank. He then disdained the places from which the horse-drawn cabmen questioningly observed the passage to and fro of the newly-arrived motorcabs, but to-day the situation is indeed a changed one. Steadily has the percentage of standing time mounted up, until it is no uncommon thing to find as much as six hours per day so occupied, and this aggregate will probably become a great deal worse as soon as the present Season is over. Proprietors, not unnaturally, are asking themselves whether anything can be done to avoid these long periods during which no return is obtained either for themselves or the drivers, and it looks as though we were within measurable distance of the old days when the smartest and most-favoured drivers would begin once more to reap the reward of their personal abilities and powers of observation. There can, of course, be no return to the old practice of favoured waiting outside the best-known restaurants and hotels, because, so long as the present system of payment holds sway, in place of the system under which each driver pays a fixed sum per day for his cab, and keeps any excess, it is impossible for a cab to loiter about for its " private " call without a risk that the flag's position will upset prior calculations for example, if in the " For Hire " position, the cab might be hailed by any casual passer-by for an eightpenny run, or if the flag were put down—so that the man might represent to the police or anybody else that he was already engaged--the clock would be registering against him.
A reversion to the peculiar and " inside " methods which preceded the advent of the motorcab, one of which we have indicated above, is most unlikely, but we do think that the companies might advantageously each morning put up in their garages a list of the day's arrangements as published in one or other of the leading daily newspapers. The writer, after attendance at several recent public meetings, all of which were so notified in the public Press, found that it was the horse cabby only who was on the alert for the dispersal of such meetings, although scores of taxicabs were " on the rank " only a few hundred yards away. The horse-cabs got the fares on those occasions, and they are typical of many others.