A few years ago I came home from Italy with my family. It had been a wonderful trip. My parents had joined us, and although getting around hadn’t always been easy for them, they had loved every moment of it. It was the last foreign holiday we would all take together.
We landed at Aberdeen late at night and joined the taxi queue. It was cold in the way Aberdeen is always cold after anywhere warm, and we stood joking about it, the contrast between where we had just been and where we now were, and the familiar absurdity of once again waiting far longer than anyone should have to wait for a taxi at an airport serving a major city. When a car finally arrived for my wife, my son and my mother-in-law, we said our goodbyes to my parents. The taxi fleet at Aberdeen Airport runs almost entirely to large wheelchair accessible vehicles, the result of a council mandate that has somehow managed to be expensive, uncomfortable, and insufficient all at once, and the cars simply don’t fit everyone. We got in and assumed my parents would follow shortly behind.
I didn’t find out until days later that my taxi had been the last one for over an hour. My parents had stood there, exhausted after a long journey, in the cold, waiting. My father was not a timid man. But he understood that standing at a taxi rank at midnight was not the place to change anything, and so he and my mother waited, as they always did, without making a fuss about it.
He died a couple of years later. I still think about that night.
I’ve travelled to London for work most weeks for the better part of a decade. More recently I’ve managed to cut it down to a couple of trips a month, which has done wonders for my sanity. On a recent trip I upgraded to Business Class and paid for it myself. I should be honest about the motivation. It wasn’t entirely the tactical calculation of sitting near the front to reach the taxi rank before the cars ran out, though that was part of it. BA points accumulate with every upgrade, and lounge access status is genuinely difficult to retain. It was a combination of the practical and the self-interested, and the fact that this is the level of calculation required just to get home from Aberdeen Airport tells you most of what you need to know.
The taxi situation at Aberdeen Airport has been a running complaint among frequent travellers for years. There are never enough cars. A single operator holds effective control of the rank. The airport charges a £7 surcharge simply for the privilege of being collected or dropped off [3][4]. A few years ago I started a formal petition to end the monopoly [1]. It gathered 826 signatures, a concentrated cross-section of the frequent flyers who actually keep the regional economy moving. It ran into the familiar wall of not knowing who had the actual power or will to act, and the momentum died.
The collapse of the taxi queue doesn’t even require a busy airport to trigger it. Aberdeen Airport is not a busy airport, and flights arrive in clusters rather than steadily. It only takes two flights landing at the same time, a BA from London, a KLM from Amsterdam, a holiday charter, for the handful of cars the single operator has available to disappear immediately. The queue that forms behind them waits for each car to complete a journey and return for a second or third trip. On a bad night that means standing outside Aberdeen Airport for an hour or more, because the system has no resilience whatsoever.
The wheelchair accessible vehicle fleet has its own story. Decades ago Aberdeen Council mandated that taxis operating from the airport must be wheelchair accessible vehicles. The intention was something like the London Black Cab, a professional, purpose-built vehicle. What the policy actually produced was a fleet of large, noisy, cold vans that are more expensive to buy than standard saloons, less practical than a Black Cab, and deeply uncomfortable for most passengers. The policy is now effectively irreversible. Taxi owners bought these vehicles in good faith under the council mandate, and revoking the ruling would expose the council to compensation claims. So the inadequate fleet remains, locked in place by the consequences of the original bad decision, which is itself a precise summary of how Aberdeen manages most of its structural problems.
But this was never really about taxis. It is about something larger and more damaging, the specific way Aberdeen consistently responds to big problems with small plans.
The original mistake goes back decades. When the airport was developed, the terminal was built on the opposite side of the runway from the railway line. That single decision locked the city into a fragmented transport layout that makes no rational sense. Instead of a rail connection to the terminal, we have an isolated station, a shuttle bus, and a taxi rank that cannot cope when two flights land at the same time. Almost every comparable European airport solved this problem before it became one. Aberdeen created it and has been managing around it ever since.
It is not that Aberdeen lacks the capability to think or build at scale. This region spent fifty years designing, engineering, project managing and installing the infrastructure for one of the most complex industrial operations in human history, in conditions more hostile than anything Dyce experiences in February. The capability is not in question. What is in question is whether the people making civic decisions have any intention of matching the scale of the problem with the scale of the response.
What we consistently get instead is a collection of isolated initiatives, each one expensive, each one politically cautious, and none of them connected to a coherent vision. Bus gates with no supporting infrastructure. A Low Emission Zone introduced before a reliable public transport alternative exists. Traffic restrictions that look tidy on a consultant’s slide and collapse immediately when exposed to real human behaviour. The AWPR bypass is genuinely good infrastructure, but it took so long to approve and build that the economic landscape had already shifted by the time the first car drove on it.
The promotional documents are always impressive. The masterplans, the glossy PDFs, the animated fly-throughs, full of confident language about connectivity and placemaking and integrated systems. It all looks credible until you step off a flight and try to get home.
The through-line connecting all of this, the taxi rank, the hydrogen buses quietly sold off, the wind turbines imported from Denmark, the space industry supply chain Aberdeen isn’t part of, is the same structural failure repeated in different settings. A city with world-class industrial capability, making decisions that are consistently smaller than the problems they are supposed to solve.
Aberdeen became the Oil and Gas Capital of Europe because a previous generation made large decisions that matched the scale of a genuine opportunity. They didn’t manage around problems. They solved them, at cost, with commitment, and without retreating when it got difficult.
My father stood in the cold at Aberdeen Airport for over an hour because nobody had ever decided that fixing the taxi situation properly was worth the effort. It would not have been a complicated fix. It would not have required the engineering capability that built the North Sea. It would have required someone to decide it mattered, and then to follow through.
That is all any of this requires. The decision to match the plan to the problem. Aberdeen has done it before. The question is whether it remembers how.
References
[1] End Taxi Monopoly at Aberdeen International Airport – Change.org petition
[2] Warning: change to end Aberdeen airport taxi queue pain ‘materially risks security’ – Press and Journal
[3] Taxi drivers refuse to work over airport charge – BBC News
[4] Talks aim to resolve Aberdeen Airport taxi dispute – BBC News