Cabbies Fume As Paris Hails 1,500 New Taxis

"There'll be trouble," spat the man behind the wheel as we hurtled through the pre-lunch traffic earlier this week, pedestrians hopping hastily aside and other motorists left gesturing Gallically in our wake.

"Whore of my testicles, there'll be trouble. Eighteen years I've been in this job and I've never seen the boys so angry."

As opening conversational gambits go this was unusually cheery, coming from a Paris taxi driver. But something was clearly up. What it was, the driver told me when he wasn't accusing the man in front of having been born in a brothel, was that the town hall had decided, on the advice of the chief of police, to increase the number of licensed taxi cabs plying the streets of the French capital.

"Another 1,500 licences over the next five years," he said. "When half of us are already on the equivalent of the minimum wage. It's theft, pure and simple. We won't sit by and let it happen."

Under the circumstances (an urgent summons to the foreign ministry), it didn't seem politic to disagree. But inwardly I blessed the good councillors: grabbing a cab in Paris is an exercise that requires, on a good day, time, patience and luck. On a bad day, forget it.

Intrigued by the driver's news, I asked at the town hall.

Back in the Belle Epoque days of 1920, it seems, Paris had 25,000 taxis. But that clearly was altogether too pleasant for the people who used them, so a bylaw was passed in 1937 cutting their number to a more reasonable 14,000. Since then it has been increased just twice, in 1967 and 1991, to a grand total of 14,900.

This means, if my maths are not mistaken, that while the population of greater Paris has grown from 4m to nearly 10m, and incomes have risen such that many more people are inclined to take a taxi, a major European capital now has less than 60% of the taxis that it had 78 years ago. (London has more than four times as many taxis as Paris.)

The consequences of this are not immediately appreciable to the casual observer. Between, say, 9am and midday and 3pm and 7pm, finding a taxi in Paris is no problem: there are hundreds of them cruising the streets or waiting patiently at one of their 487 ranks, smoking a Gauloise (the driver, that is).

But when most normal people might actually want a cab, which is to say to go to lunch or dinner, out for the evening, or home after midnight, they vanish. This is because the Paris taxi driver's dejeuner is as sacrosanct as his diner, and at night, naturellement, he sleeps.

Paris cabbies, enthusiastic mounters of strikes, go-slows and blockades whenever anyone threatens the status quo, say the council's daring decision will slash their incomes by 20%, and ruin the market in taxi licences to boot.

These currently change hands for just under £75,000, and represent a handy retirement bonus for most drivers.

But what will really inflame passions is not so much the new licence-holders as the one condition that the town hall plans to place on them: the obligation to work from noon to 3pm, 7pm to 9pm, and after midnight.

"There'll be trouble," spat the cabbie who arrived to take the babysitter home the other night (after a 20-minute wait on the phone to book him).

"On the head of my mother, it's an outrage. When are we supposed to eat?"