A first-week checklist for new joiners in taxi, cab and passenger transport

A new chauffeur reports at 5.30 pm for night duty at the airport. Nobody has said which arrival bay to queue in, how the FASTag debit appears on his trip sheet, or whom to ring when a flight lands at 2 am and the guest's number goes straight to voicemail. By the third night he is gone. The owner blames him. The real gap was the missing first week.

Here is a week-long sheet for a chauffeur, control-room dispatcher or bus attendant entering a cab or coach fleet. Print it. Give it to the yard supervisor with a ballpen. The wider picture of this trade sits on the passenger transport hub.

Joiner, vehicle number, shift pattern, reporting supervisor: ______
Day 0. Sight licence, badge, permit copy, fitness paper and address proof. Scan them. Enter every expiry date in the tracker.
Day 0. Issue uniform, ID card, torch, first-aid box. Check fire extinguisher, spare wheel, jack, reflective triangle.
Day 1. Ride-along on a full shift with a senior driver. Show app login, trip accept, OTP start, cash or UPI close.
Day 1. Press the panic button in the yard while the control room watches for the alert and the live tracker pin.
Day 2. Walk the ten busiest pickup points: arrival bay, hotel porch, IT park gate, railway forecourt.
Day 2. Practise greeting, luggage lift, door handling, and the line to use when running late.
Day 3. Solo duty with three check calls: start, midpoint, close.
Day 4. Vehicle walk-round: tyres, wipers, headlamps, belts, AC, boot, dashcam. Sign the duty slip.
Day 5. Read pay terms aloud: trip rate, waiting charge, night allowance, toll refund, cash deposit time.
Day 6. Explain weekly off, leave requests and swap rules, then pencil them against his name on the roster.
Day 7. Ten minutes with the transport manager: what was unclear, what went wrong. Confirm or extend the trial.

The yard supervisor holds the paper. The newcomer puts his initials where a task was shown. On day seven the transport manager reads it and slips it into the driver's folder. An empty line points at the supervisor, not the joiner. Use one sheet per person and go through a month's worth in a single sitting.

• Expiry dates: a lapsed badge, permit or fitness paper gets a car stopped at a checkpoint. A tracker with a thirty-day alert avoids the roadside argument.
• Ride-along: apps differ between fleets. A driver who learns the OTP flow with a guest in the back loses the guest.
• Panic test: a button never pressed cannot be trusted at 2 am.
• Pickup walk: Terminal 2 waits differently from a gated township or a campus with a gate pass desk.
• Pay terms read aloud: most quarrels start with a surprise on payday, not with the rate itself.
• Dashcam and walk-round: they protect the driver in a claim as much as the owner.

Build the tracker as a plain grid. Each person gets a row and each paper a column: driving licence, PSV badge, police clearance letter, medical, eye test, vehicle fitness, insurance, pollution certificate. Colour the cell amber thirty days before expiry and red at ten. The dispatcher reviews it every Monday morning and rings the amber names. Never let a traffic constable discover a dead date first. A driver with a red cell is not rostered until the renewal receipt is stapled to the file. Keep a second tab for vehicles: RC book, road tax, GPS device SIM validity, speed governor seal, and the due date of the next tyre rotation.

On a school run, the attendant needs the route card, the list of children by stop, the rule on who may board, and the drill for a stalled bus with children inside. A staff-shuttle driver needs the manifest, the pickup order, the escort rule for women on night drops and the gate pass process on each campus. Draw job roles from the school bus operator role pages.

1. 1

   Papers seen, never stored

   Photocopies in a dispatcher's drawer vanish. Scan on day zero and set the expiry alert.

2. 2

   Pay explained once, on the phone

   Type the rate and the cut-off day at the head of the sheet.

3. 3

   Nobody asks the new man

   On day three, the supervisor asks for one confusing thing and one good thing, and writes both down.

4. 4

   Key handed over without a walk-round

   No signed duty slip, no key. Treat it as a gate.

It sits inside the wider employee onboarding process. For keeping airport drivers beyond the first month, read the airport taxi retention notes.

To fit this sheet to your own cars and duty pattern, describe the fleet on the requirements page.