London lost a third of its taxis while private hire grew by 80%

The demand for point to point transport in London did not fall. What changed is which licence carries it, and how the passenger asks for it.

In 2013 there were 22,200 licensed taxis in London. By April 2023 there were 15,100: a third of the fleet, gone in a decade. Over the same period private hire vehicles went from 49,900 to 89,600, an increase of eighty per cent. London now licenses roughly six private hire vehicles for every taxi.

Why this is a channel story, not a vehicle story

A taxi can be hailed on the street and picked up at a rank. A private hire vehicle cannot: by law every job must be pre-booked through a licensed operator. So the entire growth in the London fleet sits on vehicles that only move when somebody sends them a booking, and for most of that decade the thing sending the booking has been an app.

The regulation did the counting for us. The half of the market that grew is the half that cannot exist without dispatch.

What the operator actually loses

Not one job. The relationship. A passenger who books through an app never learns the number, never saves it, never passes it to the office or the hotel where they work. A lost job is a single event. A lost contact is a recurring one.

And it compounds. Fewer calls means fewer drivers listening, fewer drivers means longer waits for the people still calling, and longer waits push them to the app as well.

The comfortable reading, and the honest one

The comfortable reading is that London is a special case: congestion charge, Knowledge, a licensing regime unlike anywhere else. The honest reading is that London is where the shift happened first and was measured properly. Every other licensing authority in the country has the same two licence classes and the same passengers.

What stays with the operator

The thing the platforms do not have: the direct relationship with the drivers and the account customers on your patch, and the licence that makes the service legal. The problem is not demand. It is the channel you collect it through.