Where Are the Cheapest and Most Expensive Places to Take a Taxi in the UK?

According to the latest research, you could be paying £1 per mile more than other UK cities to ride home in a black cab.

For example, in Coventry, passengers can expect to pay around £3.11 per mile to ride around in their local cab, this is 96p more expensive than the £2.15 per mile paid in Liverpool.

So which cities are getting stung by black cab prices and should you be looking to other firms, i.e. Cab Direct, for cheaper rides home?

The Research

To find out the disparity in costs of black cab prices around the UK, a private number plate firm looked at local authority data. It used this to rank black cab prices for 1-, 2-, 3-, 4 and 5-mile journeys around 25 of Britain’s city.

The result?

A huge difference in prices – and not just for Londoners, either.

While you may assume that London black cab prices will be the highest, that’s where you’d be wrong. There are four cities that have higher prices than our capital city.

The Most Expensive Places to Get a Black Cab

As we’ve seen, Coventry tops the list with a cost-per-mile price of £3.11. This is closely followed by £3.06 per mile in Leeds, £3.04 per mile in Oxford and £3.03 per mile in Cambridge.

London comes in fifth place with a cost-per-mile price of £2.99. And the other cities within the top 10 are Bristol (£2.90 per mile), Southampton (£2.89 per mile), Birmingham (£2.82 per mile), Manchester (£.81 per mile) and Stoke-on-Trent (£2.72 per mile).

The Cheapest Places to Get a Black Cab

In stark contrast to the above prices, the cheapest place to get a black cab (as we have seen) is Liverpool at £2.15 per mile. This is followed by Edinburgh (£2.22 per mile), Brighton (£2.28 per mile), Kingston-Upon-Hull (£2.45 per mile) and Swansea and Belfast which are also £2.45 per mile.

Others in the top 10 cheapest places are Sunderland, Bradford, Leicester and Nottingham.

One thing’s for sure, with the rise of companies like Uber, British cabbies are coming under pressure to be competitive with their pricing. And companies are also having to stand out from the crowd and offer something different for their customers. For example, The London Taxi Company (LTC) launched a new factory last year where it will produce 5,000 electric black taxies by the end of this year.