The peg board in Pony Cabs shows the position of 50 cars struggling through peak-hour traffic. The base controller holds the radio in his hand as he moves the pegs around. The six telephonists are so busy they don't take smoke breaks, but move to a different room, with a phone and computer, to have a cigarette.
With taxi-ranks at night and at peak-hours clearing at a funereal crawl, businesses and individuals are turning to hackneys. Here, too, though, demand far outweighs service.
Dublin's largest hackney companies cite three key problems: the shortage of drivers, traffic, and the exclusion of cabs from bus lanes.
Joe and Simon Pleass run Pony Cabs, one of the State's biggest hackney companies, in a cramped and busy office at Fitzwilliam Lane. They have 150 drivers, but Joe admits this is not nearly enough. On December 15th, of 6,320 calls received, just 2,718 were answered, and only 1,110 of the callers - fewer than 18 per cent - got cars. Annually the company answers two-thirds of calls, and only a quarter of the total can be converted into business.
"Drivers are what it's all about," Joe explained. "There is a limited number of drivers, and we never stop recruiting. If we had 500 cars we would probably have enough work to keep them going, but we don't have 500 drivers."
His brother Simon adds: "The bus lanes are a massive issue for us. Our drivers are sitting in traffic with everybody else. If they could use the bus lanes it would make the service we provide a lot better."
Cab companies insist advance bookings get priority, but admit calls don't get allocated to cars until within an hour of the pickup time, no matter how far in advance the booking was made. "People seem to think that if they book a car on Tuesday for Wednesday the driver gets the call on Tuesday," says Joe Pleass. They "match the drivers to the closest jobs".
City Cabs, another hackney giant with 270 drivers, faces similar frustrations. The managing director, Noel Ebbs, protests: "It's not a guaranteed service. We pull our hair out, we do our best." But he concedes: "The nature of the beast is we're going to have failure."
However, if you are one of the many left waiting by a hackney company over Christmas and are considering making a complaint, you won't get far. Beyond the company itself, there is no independent body to receive complaints about the service hackney cabs provide.