They're cheaper ?

Well, not really.

I spent a few years driving a maxi-taxi (a minibus converted to carry wheelchairs), and still occasionally drive one. On taxi ranks -- especially at night -- these eight-foot-tall, 20-foot-long taxis can be invisible as people walk straight past them and get into the sedan that's ranked behind them.

I was second on the Albert Street rank, right behind a maxi, last night when a young Malay Chinese student walked straight past the maxi and got into my cab. I thought about sending her up to the maxi, but it had been a quiet night and it was 40 minutes since my last passenger, so I decided to take her to her Kangaroo Point destination instead (just over a $10 fare).

But I had to say this when we got to Kangaroo Point:

"I saw you walked past the maxi back in the city."

"Yes" (she said).

"Do you know they're cheaper than sedans?"

"Huh?"

"Yeah, their meters run a little bit slower, and you'd have saved about 50 cents on this trip."

All bullshit, of course, but she wasn't to know that.

I reckon she'll look for the maxi-taxis on the rank next time. :)

Optimist

Ann Street in Fortitude Valley is one of the inner-city's busiest streets, no matter what time is on the clock.

As it passes through the middle of Brisbane's nightclub district, the more alarming times for driving down Ann Street are late on Friday and Saturday nights as the city's bright young things flit like moths between the strobe nightclub lights on either side of Ann Street.

The traffic -- ranging from motor scooters to 60-tonne trucks -- doesn't matter in the slightest to them as they wander across the road like Browns' Cows in their trendy black clobber at the street's darkest spots.

I'd just dropped a mob off at the Empire Hotel, right in the middle of the Valley, and was bailing back to the CBD when Oliver the Optimist frantically waved me down at 11.30pm.

A fare's a fare, and thinking he'd be in the cab quickly, I reefed the cab across to the kerb and whacked the hazard lights on. This part of Ann Street is the beginning of the on-ramp for the Story Bridge, but hell, the cab would only be stopped for a couple of seconds.

Or so I thought.

"I don't want a cab," Olly said as he opened the back door, "I'm just looking for the phone I left behind in it -- oh, you're not the cab I caught."

Yep, at 11.30 on a Friday night, this bright spark decided that the best way of retrieving the mobile phone he'd just left behind in one of Brisbane's 1,800 taxis was just to stand in the city's busiest street and hail every passing taxi until he eventually found the cab with his phone in the back.

He's probably still there.

Elsewhere on Friday night, a budding young Schumacher's weekend took a rapid turn for the worse in Logan Road when he panicked on approaching an intersection.

It was about 9pm, and our Juan Manuel was roaring up Logan Road in Woolloongabba in his Mitsubishi Cordia at about 180km/h -- an impressive feat in an inner-city street with a 60km/h speed limit -- when something made him jump on the brakes as the car roared past Lewis Street.

The brakes locked, and the Mitsubishi skidded across the centre traffic island and down the wrong side of the road for 100 metres before skidding across the Deshon Street intersection and coming to a rest against the post supporting a set of traffic lights.

The traffic island didn't divert the car's course at all.

Although the car was only good for the scrapyard's crusher, the driver somehow managed to get out of it with barely a scratch.

As for the two policemen in the police car that was stopped at the red light, they must have thought Christmas had come early. They didn't even have to chase this bloke, after all. There he was, skidding virtually straight into their laps.

The skidmarks are still in Logan Road. All 120 metres (400 feet) of them.

Justice, for a change

It's not often that you get your money back from a fare evader. Normally, the poor mug cabbie is the one who's taken for a ride and left feeling like a mug.

Last week, I copped one such passenger. A young, drunk truckie who hailed the cab at Chapel Hill to take him home to Bellbowrie, on Brisbane's western outskirts -- a fare that ought to run to about $24 or so.

As we approach Bellbowrie, he tells me that he might have a bit of trouble paying the fare, so I started to reduce my potential loss by stopping the meter at $19.

At the shops, we went through a pantomime show of him trying to get money out of the ATM, only to have his card rejected -- then the same happened at the bottle shop and again at the taxi.

Now, at 9.30pm, the nearest open police station is Indooroopilly's -- about 10 miles away -- and I didn't particularly relish the prospect of driving that distance late at night with a drunk and increasingly angry truckie beside me. So I played the mug and took him home for free.

At his house, we went through the whole routine of him trying to pay the fare yet again. Either he was genuine or a bloody good actor: I found myself wanting to think he was genuine, so I gave him the company's address to send his cheque to pay the fare later in the week.

He got a week's grace, and eight days later (Saturday 4 November) I tootled down to the local police station.

Today, a rather perplexed admin officer from the taxi company rang me, to say the the young truckie's mum had sent them the money for the fare.

Methinks he'd got a visit from the local constabulary on Guy Fawkes' Day.

It's nice when things go right.