If you love to drive and believe having more control over your working hours would suit you perfectly, then you should consider becoming a taxi driver. Doing so will see you make a good living, and it will allow you to come into contact with a great number of wonderful people.
If you want to go one step further and actually become a successful taxi driver, then you need to take the advice laid out below.
1. Drive safely
As a taxi driver, your number one goal should be to get your passengers from point A to point B without any problems. To ensure this is the case, you need to drive safely. By not doing so, not only will you will put yourself and your passengers in danger, but you will also compromise your ability to make any money.
Driving safely entails:
- Following all of the traffic laws imposed on you by the state or country in which you are driving in.
- Never exceeding any speed limits, no matter how many times your passengers might ask you to go a bit faster.
- Taking care when it comes to changing lanes, especially when it comes to the merging of taxi lanes with normal ones.
- Never take too much on work when you are tired or otherwise impaired.
2. Protect yourself at all costs
As a taxi driver, your job might be to provide a safe service to the general public, but that doesn’t mean that shouldn’t protect yourself as well. In this profession, you will come across your fair share of personal danger and, for yours and your family’s sake, you need to remain safeguarded against it all. To protect yourself, you should:
- Take out taxi insurance to cover yourself financially. Whether you’re private hire, public hire, a minibus driver, or part of a fleet taxi rank, you will be able to find specialty cover for yourself at Acorn Insurance.
- Radio your dispatcher whenever you take on a job to ensure somebody knows where you are at all times.
- Keep your doors locked between fares to ensure nobody leaves you prematurely without paying.
- Make sure lone passengers do not sit behind you — claim it is company policy.
- Be incredibly wary of passengers who provide you with vague pick-up and drop-off instructions.
- Never drive into alleyways.
- Fight your urge to resist robberies, and instead do all you can to memorize the physical description of he or she that has robbed you.
3. Know the pick-up hotspots
You aren’t going to get a steady string of income from the taxi profession if you don’t know where the pick-up hotspots are. By knowing where and when to pick passengers up, you’ll find yourself earning a lot more money. General hotspots include:
- Business areas throughout the lunchtime period.
- Partying hotspots after the local clubs and pubs shut down.
- Airports during the mid-morning rush (especially during the summer).
If you want to become a successful taxi driver, then you need to make your service as safe as possible for your passengers, you need to protect yourself from harm, and you need to know where the best places are to pick up clients.
