Taxi service connecting Catalan Pyrenees towns celebrates 20th anniversary

Marked by the Catalan Pyrenees Mountains, bordering Andorra and France, sit the Catalan counties of Pallars Sobirà and Alt Urgell.  To visit them, you don’t even need a car. In fact, the on-demand taxi service ‘Passem el Cantó’ joining the two counties is turning 20 years old this Sunday.

During its two-decade lifespan, it’s transported a total of 48,092 passengers. Many of them are people living in the small villages – thirteen, in total – that the taxi route passes through.

One of the taxi drivers from the service, Josep Colom, explained that this changes, though, in the summer. In the hotter months of the year, more and more of the passengers are tourists, interested in visiting the Catalan countryside.

The taxi company may be small, but that hasn’t stopped it from making 24,143 trips. This would equal approximately 1.3 million kilometers of road traveled. Subsidized by the Catalan government transport service, it was originally implemented to help students travel from one county to the other for their studies. The next five years that followed were so successful that it prompted the company to go from two trips per week to four per day.

Not all that dissimilar from a rideshare service, a spot in a ‘Passem el Cantó’ taxi has to be reserved in advance. To do so, you call the day before – if no seats are reserved, there’s no service. And if a passanger happens to be the only one, they’ll have plenty of space: the taxi is a minivan with room for eight.

Colom further explained that this transport service is also very helpful for the elderly communities that live in these smaller towns, individuals who might not have a car or a driver’s license. And even if they do, a taxi is more comfortable. This, according to one of the service’s passengers, Hilari Carrera, who said he prefers it to driving his own car. Winding mountain roads can be difficult to navigate, but Colom has driven this route every day for twenty years – he practically knows it by heart. On the Port del Cantó road, he can even count each of its turns (there are around 150).