The other day Twitter sent me a personalised tweet, it said that I’ve been tweeting London Trivia for 14 years. Anyone with a mind to can sign up to the social media site and scroll around to read my missives. For those of you (yes I’m including all you Baby Boomers) who can’t be bothered with all that Twitter malarkey, I put a widget on CabbieBlog’s sidebar which displayed that day’s trivia. Now Elon Musk, after paying a preposterous sum for Twitter is charging a king’s ransom for an API allowing your tweets to appear on a blog. I’m trying to work around this, but in the meantime – thanks Elon.

Stop Press. I have found a way round this by using the Google Calendar, see Daily London Trivia on the sidebar. Who needs Twitter?

If you don’t want to commit to learning all of London to gain a green badge, you can study for only 18-24 months for a yellow badge, allowing you to work in one of London’s 9 sectors. As the suburban badge is yellow, predictably they’re known as ‘canaries’.

It typically takes an applicant between 18 months to two years to complete the knowledge for a suburban sector and therefore none of this year’s applicants have been licensed to date.

Across the 9 yellow badge sectors just 1,954 drivers hold suburban licences with Transport for London.

Only 22 new applications to become a suburban black cabbie have been received by the regulator between the turn of the year and 25th May according to a Freedom of Information request. None of these applicants has as yet qualified.

Of those who have gained the required knowledge this year TfL has issued only four London suburban taxi driver licences this year.

London Mayoral hopeful Daniel Korski was a key figure in David Cameron’s attempts to protect Uber from tough regulation in the capital proposed by then-mayor, Boris Johnson. According to the Guardian’s Uber Files investigation, after the largely unregulated growth of Uber in London, Johnson was considering new rules for the taxi app. Uber was riding high at the time, having eaten into the business of black cabs and ruining many private hire offices, but the company faced accusations from critics that it was operating on the edges of the law. In September 2015 TfL launched a consultation document on some possible new restrictions on the company, like capping driver numbers or asking customers to wait five minutes between booking and getting in the vehicle.

Amid a flurry of lobbying by Uber to stop the changes it appears Korski, who, in his capacity as a Downing Street digital advisor, sent emails to TfL, the mayor’s office and Uber discussing the consultation. The emails didn’t come to light easily — at one point Downing Street faced accusations of a ‘cover-up’ when it denied Korski’s correspondence existed, only for TfL to then publish the emails anyway. But they eventually revealed that Korski was making the case in favour of Uber, accusing TfL of attempting “insane and luddite things” concerning the consultation.

Thanks to London Spy on Substack for much of this inside information.

Alarm bells started to ring at TfL with the disclosure that the number of students currently being tested to become London taxi drivers has fallen to its lowest level yet, to just 552. In November 2019 the number of candidates studying the Knowledge of London (‘KoL’) at the testing stages, otherwise known as ‘Appearances’, dropped below 1,000 for the first time and stood at 943. In addition, 714 candidates had not yet reached the testing stages but were signed on to the KoL and learning the capital’s road network. Fast forward post-pandemic restrictions to August 2021 and the number of KoL candidates at the testing stages tumbled further to just 552, and worryingly only a further 363 candidates are currently waiting to reach the testing stages. Unsurprisingly TfL now no longer publish the results relating to the number of KoL students actively learning, so a cynic like myself could conclude that those in the early stages could now only be in double figures, and as around 70 per cent of students training to become licensed London taxi drivers DO NOT COMPLETE the Knowledge of London testing process, in two years we could be seeing only a couple of dozen qualifying a year.

If our licence or badge is lost or stolen we have to report it as soon as possible. So when I relinquished my documents I’d expected TfL to acknowledge receipt. Not so. Now I’ve had my first communication from them in 2 years telling me all I need to know about ULEZ. It would seem that security comes second place to generating a revenue stream.