Why we still do this, after all these years.

Eighteen years is a long time to drive the same roads. Long enough to know which lay-by gives the best view of the firth in October. Long enough to recognise a regular by the hum their wheelie suitcase makes on the cobbles. Long enough, you'd think, to start questioning why we're still doing this at all.

People ask us that quite often, actually. Usually somewhere on the M90 between Inverkeithing and Halbeath, when the conversation has settled into that easy half-hour rhythm a long transfer naturally finds. So how long have you been doing this for? they say. And then, after the answer: Don't you ever get sick of it?

The honest answer is no. Not really. And the reason is harder to put into words than it should be.

Where this all started

We started in 2008. The financial crisis was halfway through eating the country, the local taxi rank in St Andrews was a single rusting Vauxhall, and most of the airport transfers in Fife were being run as a sideline by people who'd rather have been doing something else.

We had one car. A diesel saloon with a stripe of road salt permanently baked into the rear bumper. We had a mobile phone that we kept on the kitchen table at night so we'd hear it ring at four in the morning if a flight came in early. We had a printed list of the postcodes for every halls of residence in town, because nobody had built a search box that could find them yet.

What we had, mostly, was an idea — that you could run a small Scottish transport company without it feeling small. That you could turn up on time. That you could quote a price honestly and stick to it. That you could, when the situation called for it, lend someone a phone charger and not put it on the bill.

The reason we're still here

Plenty of people start a taxi business. Most of them don't last a decade. The ones that do tend to talk about operations: scale, fleet management, dispatch software, pricing models. All true, all important, all part of the job. But none of those things explain why someone gets up at five in the morning to meet a flight from Toronto for the eighteenth year running.

The thing that keeps us going is the conversations.

Every airport run is forty minutes of someone's life handed to you in a quiet car. People who've been travelling for fifteen hours and just want someone to be kind to them. People who are on their way to bury a parent. People who've come to graduate, or to drop a child off for first year, or to play the Old Course on the morning of their seventieth birthday. People who fell in love with a Scot at a wedding in 1994 and have been coming back ever since.

You hear the most extraordinary stories if you let people tell them. Why they chose St Andrews. Why their grandfather always wanted to come. Why their daughter's acceptance letter is folded in the inside pocket of their coat. Why they've booked the same week of June for the last eleven years and won't do anything different now.

A town worth showing up for

There's a particular trick of light on the West Sands in late September that you can't describe to anyone who hasn't seen it. The sun coming low across the bay, the tide a long way out, the cathedral ruins catching the gold of it from a mile inland. We've driven past that beach six thousand times and it still stops the conversation in the car when it does that.

St Andrews is a town that hides its size well. It punches above its weight in three different international conversations — golf, learning, and stone — and it does it without ever quite showing off. You can walk from one end to the other in twenty minutes. You can stand in front of a building older than the country most of our customers have flown in from.

People come for the Old Course and stay for the fish supper. They come for graduation and book their wedding here three summers later. They come for a long weekend and then, every year for the rest of their lives, they tell their children about it.

Putting the town on the map, one drive at a time

Somewhere along the way — we couldn't tell you exactly when — the job stopped feeling like just transport and started feeling like something closer to introductions. People are arriving in a town they've never been to, often after a very long day, often with someone they love in the seat beside them, and we're the first conversation they'll have here.

That's a privilege we don't take lightly. We tell them which café Davie thinks does the best bacon roll. We tell them that the Castle ruins are quieter at eight in the morning than at any other time of the day. We tell them, if they're here for golf, that the New Course is a more beautiful walk than the Old, and they should book it.

We don't do this because we have to. We do it because the town deserves it. Every taxi journey is a small advertisement — for a coffee shop, a fishmonger, a hotel, a course, a walk, a view. If we get it right, the people we've driven from Edinburgh Airport spend their holiday in places run by other people we know, and those people get to keep doing what they love too.

That's how a small economy stays a small economy. That's how a town stays itself.

What our customers have taught us

We thought, when we started this, that we were in the business of moving people from A to B. We weren't. We were in the business of being there when people arrived. The customers taught us that, not the other way round.

They taught us that punctuality isn't a feature, it's a kindness. They taught us that the price you give on booking should be the price on the receipt, every single time. They taught us that helping with a heavy case isn't weakness, it's the entire point. They taught us that the difference between a job and a calling is whether you remember the name of the person you drove last week.

And they taught us, year after year, that the thing they wanted most from us wasn't a slick app or a fancy fleet — it was the boring, unglamorous, almost holy reliability of someone simply turning up when they said they would. We have a written guarantee about that now, and we've only had to honour it twice in eight years. We're proud of that number, but we're prouder of the customers who made us hold ourselves to it.

Why we'll never leave

There are easier ways to make a living. We know that. We could have moved into Edinburgh, chased the corporate contracts, bought a fleet of identical black saloons and run them on an algorithm. Plenty of people have. Some of them are very rich now.

But you don't run a small business in a small town for eighteen years unless you've fallen for the place. We fell for St Andrews a long time ago, and we haven't fallen out of it yet. We know its weather, its tides, its term dates and its tournaments. We know which back road to take when the A91 is closed for an accident at Guardbridge. We know the porter at every halls of residence by their first name.

We know that on the third Saturday of September every year, the new students arrive and the town doubles in size for a weekend, and we know how to plan a fleet around that. We know that the Open will eventually come back, and we'll be ready. We know what it sounds like when the gulls start at four in the morning above the harbour.

Most of all we know the people. The hundreds of returning regulars who book us first because last time we got it right. The parents whose four years of student transfers have turned into a friendship. The widow who travels back every year on her wedding anniversary, and tells us about her husband on the way in, and quietly thanks us when we drop her off at the same hotel he booked for her in 1986.

Those people are the reason. They always have been. We wouldn't still be here without them, and the truth is we wouldn't want to be anywhere else.

If you're reading this on a flight in

Welcome. Or welcome back. We'll be the navy van at the kerb when you land — clean, on time, and with the heater already on if it's November. Tell us your story on the way over the Forth, if you fancy. We'll tell you a few of ours.

And then we'll do what we've been doing every week for eighteen years. We'll show you the town we love, the way it deserves to be shown, and we'll hand you over to it gently.

— The St Andrews Shuttle team