Taxi Licensing Follow-Up Study: Summary of Main Results

This paper presents the findings of a survey of taxi licensing policy in England and Wales in mid 1989. The survey acts partly as a follow-up study to earlier work reported earlier in this series (Toner 1989 WP 273) and partly as a vehicle for the assessment of a number of additional issues. These issues form the key to an understanding of the consequences to both consumers of taxi services and road users more generally of the decision to either retain or remove restrictions on entry to the hackney carriage trade. The results presented are purely corss-sectional in nature and do not include a treatment of the important issues of price and service effects. These topics will form the basis of further papers (see, for example Pells, (1990) WP 290 for initial findings on values of waiting time and price elasticities in the hackney market).