For people crowding back into restaurants, stumbling out of reopened clubs, or heading again to airports, life is getting back to normal. At least that is until they pick up their phone for a taxi, or search a ride-hailing app, in vain. Where have all the cab drivers gone?
“It’s horrendous,” says Steve Farrier, owner of Alpha Cars in Havant, Hampshire. “You can’t get drivers for love or money. You don’t get a break.” He turns the automated booking service off at weekends, “or we couldn’t meet the demand”.
For most of 2020 and 2021, it was customers that were missing, as Covid killed the cab trade. Now firms small and large, from Alpha to Uber, lack drivers at a time when business could boom again.
Many cab drivers who left – for sectors such
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