What does the licensed trade in Somerset actually look like?
Somerset licenses 927 vehicles as at 1 April 2024 — 547 hackney carriages and 380 private hire vehicles.
The fleet splits fairly evenly between the two trades. That is the awkward middle: drivers move between rank work and booked jobs during a shift, so availability is genuinely uncertain unless something tracks it.
A fleet in this range is past the point where one controller sees everything at once, but not yet big enough to absorb a bad half-hour without customers noticing.
972 driver licences are in force against those 927 vehicles, or 1.05 drivers per vehicle. Most vehicles are effectively single-driver, so utilisation is capped by driver hours rather than by vehicle supply.
