The purpose of this thesis is to focus on some of the different decisions taken by taxi drivers. The three main areas considered are when a taxi driver chooses to work, where they choose to work and having chosen when and where, the strategy employed by the taxi driver. The chapter examining the decision on when a taxi driver chooses to work considers whether drivers are consistent with the neoclassical model of labour supply. Existing literature on taxi drivers has suggested taxi drivers behave in different ways. This thesis finds that taxi drivers respond to earning opportunities and are more likely to work when the earning opportunities are better than usual. The decision on where a taxi driver chooses to look for fares uses an experimental approach, putting subjects in the position of drivers choosing locations in a square grid. The location choice is a two dimensional extension of Hotelling’s model. In this particular experiment, Nash equilibrium is not obtained through minimum nor maximum differentiation and the learning of subjects and subsequent performance improvement is slow. Simulation through agent-based computational economics is used to investigate the different strategies taxi drivers can use. The simulations show that drivers can increase their own earnings and reduce the waiting time of potential customers by adopting a strategy which makes use of all the available information. The simulations also show that the effectiveness of a strategy is dependent on the choices of other drivers. This thesis suggests a different approach to the analysis of the labour supply decisions of taxi drivers and makes some recommendations regarding regulation of taxi services. The experimental and simulation chapters contribute to the literature through making use of these approaches in the context of looking at taxi drivers. The experiment and simulation could also be extended into other areas.

This dissertation uses the taxicab as a vehicle to tell the story of the Pakistani Muslim community from the 1970s onwards. The research includes an in-depth ethnography (2013-2014) on Muslim cab drivers that live and work in West Yorkshire, northern England, but who vary in age as well as place of birth. Most have their heritage in and around the villages of Mirpur, Azad Kashmir/Pakistan, as do the vast majority of the Pakistani diaspora in Britain. One driver's personal narrative organizes my thesis: a former rude boy turn revert (practicing Muslim), whose trajectory is situated in the 1980s and 1990s specifically. Exploring themes of family, community, religious identities, and violence, ‘Cab Driving in the Spirit of Islam’ refers to the richness of Islamic religious traditions as well as the specter which continues to haunt the liberal imaginary, both of which help shape the world of Muslim cab driving. Cab driving is a hyper-individualistic pursuit, the first steps towards integration into mainstream society and corollary normative acceptability. Yet paradoxically, for these South Asian Muslims, cab driving has stabilized into a communal infrastructure, a way of life for over three decades now, and as integral to them as the two Islamic traditions in their lives, Barelwi and Tablighi respectively. In the world of Muslim cab driving, critical knowledge is shared and passed on as religious community is continuously produced. The circulating cab driver occupies a pivotal mediating role, full of potential and promise, but also a position fraught with risk. As a figure of access and “plain person” in Alasdair MacIntyre’s words, he is an integral religious authority in this sociality, readily available to dispense and enjoin the Islamic good. It requires virtue and skill to live according to the sunna, the model of ethicality based on the Prophet’s example, the Prophet motive, rather than being dictated by the profit motive. In doing so, the expert driver turns a possible vulnerability into a potentiality. The study has five parts. In ‘Formations of the Rude Boy,’ I introduce the “boys,” figures of resistance and rebellion analogous to Paul Willis’ working-class “lads.” Via the critical medium of the car, the boy becomes the sovereign-beast. He takes possession of his fate, the ineluctable predicament of degraded cab driver, position occupied by his father and "uncles." However, the significant difference from my findings and Willis’ research is that the world of cab driving mediates Islamic religious traditions to produce the Islamic counterpublic (Charles Hirschkind), thereby unsettling the normative regime where school complements workplace. The sphere of pious cab driving is tantamount to an education in the Islamic virtues, described in Part II, ‘Righteous Turn.’ The overlay of revivalist discourse and practice onto the cabbing infrastructure, especially the spiritual exchanges in the taxi base, enables the rude boy’s ‘reversion,’ an un-becoming Sovereign and a life-altering trajectory shared by a significant constituency in this Islamic revival. In his pious turn, the former “boy” sees the other side to the tradition, one of care and concern, rather than the policing which he aspired to rebel against. Part III, ‘Riding with the Enemy,’ examines the specter of “Islam” in liberalism. Drivers work all over England, including the country proper, villages and market towns whose residents are predominantly non-Muslim whites. The driver is thus at the core of liberalism, both materially and psychologically. The Muslim driver is a marked target, a convenient opportunity and point of access, resulting in a concentration of violence in the cab. In the possibility that the ride turns into a sexual encounter, the Muslim driver is the “intimate enemy.” I investigate the gendered dimension in this mode of everyday violence, tying together the performance of expected gender roles to a resurgent nationalist sentiment that necessitates the need to disavow the Muslim/the migrant within. I trace the emergence of this nationalist subjectivity in the decline of the white working-class while attending to the spatial transformations and movements taking place in these landscapes. In Part IV, ‘Care Drivers,’ I consider the driver’s response in this vulnerable predicament as the putatively lacking migrant. The pious driver learns to depend and trust in God. He draws upon the significance of the social position of ‘lack’ and ‘beginning’ in Islamic tradition, most notably the Prophet’s companion, Bilal, the exemplar par excellence of embodying piety and practicing sabr, the virtue of endurance, in the face of degradation, inferiority and violence. While Muslim cab driving has formed a way of life, it is far from stagnant. In Part V, ‘Revaluation of the Saints,’ I explore the shifts and transformations that result in the transnational circulation of goods and people, as the returning émigré-driver is endowed with a saint-like authority, produced out of the two dominant South Asian Muslim traditions, ‘Sufi’ Barelwi and ‘Deobandi’ Tablighi, mediated by cab driving and the migration process. I analyze changes in the religious authority and practices of these Muslims, a matter of ‘knowing the men,’ their good deeds and actions, as they strive to ‘live Medina’ in modern England.

Conics and Geometry is a report that focuses on the development of new approaches in mathematics by breaking from the accepted norm of the time. The conics themselves have their beginning in this manner. The author uses three ancient problems in geometry to illustrate this trend. Doubling the cube, squaring the circle, and trisecting an angle have intrigued mathematicians for centuries. The author shows various approaches at solving these three problems: Hippias’ Quadratrix to trisect an angle and square the circle, Pappus’ hyperbola to trisect an angle, and Little and Harris’ simultaneous solution to all three problems. After presenting these approaches, the focus turns to the conic sections in the non-Euclidean geometry known as Taxicab geometry. / text

Thesis (M.A. (Organisational Psychology))--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Humanities, School of Human and Community Development / Abstract The following research report aimed to determine how the South African print media socially constructs minibus taxi drivers. In order to achieve this aim, a media survey of South African newspaper articles reporting on minibus taxi drivers in the year 2014 was conducted. The collected articles revealed the print media’s social constructions of minibus taxi drivers. The media is a very powerful entity which has the ability to create and shift the perceptions of those who read their reports. It is through this ability, that the media portray the current social relations existing in post-Apartheid South Africa. The researcher was able to determine these different social constructions through the use of a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) methodology. This methodology allowed the reader to look beyond the words the journalists used, and rather to focus on the implications of these words as well as what had not been explicitly mentioned. This research found that the minibus taxi driver was socially constructed using three discourses: ‘The Bad Citizen’, ‘The Victim’ and ‘The Good Citizen’. This research provides the platform for future research into the perceptions of the minibus taxi and the minibus taxi industry. Understanding these perceptions is vital in transforming the transportation industry of South Africa. Key words: Minibus taxi drivers; Minibus taxi industry; Social constructions, South African print media; Newspaper articles, 2014. / GR2016

The South African taxi industry is a fast-growing industry and greatly contributes to the GDP growth of the country. While it also contributes to the decrease of unemployment problem in the country, it does very little to compensate its employees, the taxi drivers. A large body of research has been done on the taxi industry regarding its growth and future development such as recapitalization, and SANTACOs initiatives at introducing a much affordable Airline. However, little research has been done concerning the financial challenges facing taxi drivers in South Africa, especially in Umbumbulu, South of Durban, KwaZulu-Natal. This is the gap this dissertation is attempting to fill in. The purpose of this dissertation is to enhance understanding of how taxi drivers fare in this fast growing informal economy, namely, the taxi industry, by investigating their financial management practices. Through the utilization of, questionnaires, indepth interviews and ethnographic approach, a model will be developed to describe, firstly, how financial management practices are carried out to facilitate the fulfillment of specific life goals of these taxi drivers and secondly, discuss how these practices translate to financial management. For the purpose of this study a questionnaire was used to investigate the financial management practices of taxi drivers in Umbumbulu. 27 owners and drivers were interviewed during their loading intervals when they were not busy. The study revealed that the Umbumbulu Taxi Rank drivers face huge financial difficulties which are due to different reasons. The challenges have been found to not only affect them but also their families. The conclusion drawn from the results was that even though taxi drivers face these problems they are able to deal with them through different strategies, such as, saving money through Stokvel and savings accounts. / Thesis (M.Com.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2012.

Orientadora: Profa. Dra. Sinuê Dayan Barbero Lodovici / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal do ABC, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Mestrado Profissional em Matemática em Rede Nacional, 2017. / É comum realizarmos revisões de conteúdos com os alunos com o objetivo de sanar dúvidas e consolidar conceitos. Neste trabalho, apresentamos a Geometria do Taxista, uma geometria que difere da Geometria Euclidiana na maneira de medir as distâncias. Pela proximidade com a Geometria Euclidiana, propusemos cinco atividades que possibilitarão a apresentação desse conteúdo, a revisão e a consolidação de muitos temas abordados nos diversos anos que antecedem o ensino superior. Esperamos que este trabalho contribua para o aprendizado de alunos e professores. / It¿s a quite usual practice to review some mathematics topics on the middle and, mainly, high school, several times in order to consolidate math¿s fundamental concepts among the students. In the present work, we present the Taxicab Geometry, a geometry which differs from the usual Euclidean Geometry on the way one can measure distances. Due to the close relationship with the Euclidean Geometry, we propose some activities that provide us a nice revision and consolidation exercise on several geometric and algebraic topics relevant to undergraduate students aspirants. We deeply hope that this work can contribute someway to the teachers¿ and students¿ learning process.

M.Com. (Informatics) / This research has the aim of creating a low-cost, contactless, micro-payment framework to support micro-payments for the informal taxi industry in South Africa. The informal taxi industry is a prime example of an industry that needs simple and effective payments for low-cost services where the primary medium of payment is currently cash. Challenges of currently used are the security of cash, the difficulty for the taxi driver to collect cash, and the auditability of cash from the perspective of the taxi owner. Furthermore, the taxi owner does not know the routes the taxi travels or the petrol that is used by the taxi. Micro-payment transaction volumes are rapidly increasing due to consumer need for simple and effective payments for low-cost items and services. Micro-payment technologies are rapidly growing in popularity and demand, prompting the need for financial institutions to consider investment in the technology. Contactless technology, specifically near-field communication (NFC), is contributing to the exponential growth of micro-payments. Increasingly, consumers are not required to enter security information in order to perform transactions. By bringing a compatible card within range of a suitable reader, a transaction takes place with immediate effect, with little or no involvement from payment providers and financial institutions. Complementary wireless technologies such as GPS enable a multitude of applications by offering positional and speed information. Combining GPS technology with NFC enables contactless positional payment information to be accessible, to present a unique micro-payment concept. This dissertation presents M-Thinta, a low-cost contactless micro-payment model. The M-Thinta prototype demonstrates the real-world operation of the M-Thinta model. The prototype demonstrates that it is possible to create a functional low-cost, contactless micro-payment platform by combining a number of standard low-cost components.

M.Tech. (Operations Management) / Please refer to full text to view abstract

Motivated by the imbalance between demand (i.e., passenger requests) and supply (i.e., available vehicles) in the ride-hailing market and severe traffic congestion faced by modern cities, this dissertation aims to improve the efficiency of the sharing economy by building an agent-based methodological framework for optimal decision-making of distributed agents (e.g., autonomous shared vehicles), including passenger-seeking and route choice. Furthermore, noticing that city planners can impact the behavior of agents via some operational measures such as congestion pricing and signal control, this dissertation investigates the overall bilevel problem that involves the decision-making process of both distributed agents (i.e., the lower level) and central city planners (i.e., the upper level). First of all, for the task of passenger-seeking, this dissertation proposes a model-based Markov decision process (MDP) approach to incorporate distinct features of e-hailing drivers. The modified MDP approach is found to outperform the baseline (i.e., the local hotspot strategy) in terms of both the rate of return and the utilization rate. Although the modified MDP approach is set up in the single-agent setting, we extend its applicability to multi-agent scenarios by a dynamic adjustment strategy of the order matching probability which is able to partially capture the competition among agents. Furthermore, noticing that the reward function is commonly assumed as some prior knowledge, this dissertation unveils the underlying reward function of the overall e-hailing driver population (i.e., 44,000 Didi drivers in Beijing) through an inverse reinforcement learning method, which paves the way for future research on discovering the underlying reward mechanism in a complex and dynamic ride-hailing market. To better incorporate the competition among agents, this dissertation develops a model-free mean-field multi-agent actor-critic algorithm for multi-driver passenger-seeking. A bilevel optimization model is then formulated with the upper level as a reward design mechanism and the lower level as a multi-agent system. We use the developed mean field multi-agent actor-critic algorithm to solve for the optimal passenger-seeking policies of distributed agents in the lower level and Bayesian optimization to solve for the optimal control of upper-level city planners. The bilevel optimization model is applied to a real-world large-scale multi-class taxi driver repositioning task with congestion pricing as the upper-level control. It is disclosed that the derived optimal toll charge can efficiently improve the objective of city planners. With agents knowingwhere to go (i.e., passenger-seeking), this dissertation then applies the bilevel optimization model to the research question of how to get there (i.e., route choice). Different from the task of passenger-seeking where the action space is always fixed-dimensional, the problem of variable action set emerges in the task of route choice. Therefore, a flow-dependent deep Q-learning algorithm is proposed to efficiently derive the optimal policies for multi-commodity multi-class agents. We demonstrate the effect of two countermeasures, namely tolling and signal control, on the behavior of travelers and show that the systematic objective of city planners can be optimized by a proper control.

Thesis ( MPAM.) -- University of Limpopo, 2021 / This study focuses on the role of the minibus taxi industry in promoting the development of small businesses at Mankweng taxi ranks. This area of study has not been thoroughly researched; therefore, existing literature on the role of the taxi industry in promoting the development of small (especially informal) businesses is limited. This lack thereof does not help in casting a clear sense of how the taxi industry benefits small businesses around their operation centres. Therefore, this study specifically investigated the role of the minibus taxi industry in promoting the development of small businesses at Mankweng Taxi Ranks. Both quantitative and qualitative research methods were employed, with the use of structured questionnaire and focus group interviews as techniques to collect data from Mankweng Taxi Ranks. The study had a target population of 300. Stratified random sampling was chosen for small businesses while random sampling was employed for taxi operators, and purposive sampling was applied for employees at Mankweng main taxi offices. This study had a sample size of 300, sampled differently with 180 participants forming part of stratified random sampling and 110 participants forming part of random sampling. Two different questionnaires were prepared for both small businesses and taxi operators. Questionnaires were randomly distributed to small businesses (30 hawkers, 15 filling stations, 69 street produce sellers, 15 car washers, 15 restaurants, and 36 caterers) and 110 taxi operators at different taxi ranks such as Mankweng, Boyne, Ga-Mothapo, Solomondale and Dikgale. Additionally, the focus group interviews were purposively conducted with 10 employees working at Boyne, as it is the main office of the Mankweng Taxi Association, and they hold more administrative information relating to the taxi business. The findings of the study show that, the taxi industry play a significant role in promoting the development of small businesses. The study further reveals that, poor business plans, inadequate working conditions, taxi violence, reckless driving, and a lack of funding affected the investigated businesses, as well as lack of exposure to new products, confronted the Mankweng Taxi Association. There seems to be a huge gap, both in research and government policy, that, seeks to promote the development of small businesses depending on the environment, and infrastructure, in which these businesses operate. Additionally, this study reveals the nature of the taxi industry and its crucial role in benefiting small businesses. All stakeholders in the taxi industry need to create an environment that, encourages the spirit of harmony, active cooperation and development dedicated to the betterment of the taxi industry.