"Roland Perry" wrote in message
...
In message , at 18:21:49 on Tue, 6 Oct 2015,
tim..... remarked:

It's not necessarily important for every private hire vehicle to
offer disability access, because the are pre-booked. As long as
each firm has some minimum number of such vehicles available if
requested, that should be sufficient.

That I understand

but unless that "minimum number" is somewhat larger than you might
first calculate, you either end up with the accessible cabs waiting
around all day for the one disabled passenger, or no accessible cabs
free at the time that passenger turns up.

It's queuing theory 101, not that difficult.

to a graduate level statistician perhaps,

You do Stats 101 in the first year!

In the first year of what?

The undergraduate course. I can't believe you really didn't know that.

your post was unclear.

I really didn't know what it was you were saying (you could have meant
"first year at school", for all I knew).

Assuming you now mean "I can't believe you really didn't know that this is
part of Y1 stats", I really have no idea what the curriculum for graduate
level stats is, and I agree that I was exaggerating when I suggested that it
would need the full course to solve this problem - a failed grad would do.

But the point that I was making was that this isn't school level knowledge,
nor (as one) is it graduate level engineering knowledge (if you don't
optionally take that specialisation - ISTR that you once said you did).

This isn't a simple 40 hour a week problem. You have to solve it for 7 days
a week 24 hours a days, with (presumably) variable demand and potential
supply at various parts of the day

to the average numpty who runs a cab office?

You think decisions about fleet procurement are done by a numpty in the
cab office?

Yep

That explains quite a lot.

Yep (though I think you mean that in a negative way!)

So to explain,

I have a low expectation of people who start businesses. In particular
about the amount of specialist knowledge that they have about their chosen
trade before they start

It doesn't seem unreasonable - it's the reason so many of them go bust!

Just watch one of those restaurant/hotel rescue programs and see how often
the proprietor is someone who has never worked in the industry before
thinking "I'm going to run a restaurant next week" (A real life Bert Large!)

Your expecting otherwise seems to be the outlier to me, especially for a
business with low barriers to entry such as operating a taxi!

What's likely to happen is that there's a ready reckoner, perhaps even
stipulated by the local authority, saying something like: "fleets of
2-10 should have one accessible vehicle; 11-25 three; 26-50 four" or
whatever.

But the numpty dispatcher can also use their experience to see how often
a person wanting an accessible car is kept waiting "too long", and make
recommendations to the owner.

btw, they don't sit around waiting for an accessible fare - they take
regular passengers if there's no booking in the queue for an accessible
ride.

so then the disabled pax might have an hour wait for a free cab

That's why you need a sensible ratio, but it's not 100% of the cars.

TBH Roland I was insulted that you thought I might think that the accessible
cars would sit around all day waiting for a disable pax.

It's bleeding obvious that they would take normal business as it arrived,
that why the problem is so hard

To wait an hour for the next accessible cab to be available would indicate
an *extremely* small fleet, of course.

many individual cab offices do run a small fleet