Taxi Driver Online

TfL picks up cost of £625 taxi for woman who missed last train

Tube bosses paid £625 for a taxi to take a passenger 122 miles to her home in Lincolnshire after a fault on the Victoria line meant she missed her last train.

The unnamed female passenger could have taken a train to Peterborough but she would have missed her connecting train to her home in Spalding.

London Underground was “not able” to arrange a £30 taxi for the final 20-mile leg to Spalding, so instead booked a cab from King’s Cross to her home — a two-and-three-quarter-hour trip.

The fare was revealed in figures showing Transport for London spent more than £3.5 million on taxis in 2017-18. City Hall Tory leaders said the figure was a “kick in the teeth” to commuters.

Sadiq Khan confirmed the sum spent on taxis in a written answer to questions from Susan Hall, deputy leader of the GLA Conservatives.

Most of last year’s overall £3,587,031 taxi bill was spent on collecting early morning Tube staff from home and bringing them into work.

The Mayor revealed the most expensive journey “was booked on 14 June with a distance of 122.34 miles and a cost of £520.88 excluding VAT”.

He added: “This was a special booked taxi and is an exceptional trip linked to severe service disruption following a displaced conductor rail incident at Seven Sisters.”

Ms Hall said: “TfL’s multi-million-pound taxi tab will come as a kick in the teeth for Londoners contending with rammed Tube carriages and rising season ticket prices. Mr Khan said he would cut waste at ‘flabby’ TfL, yet this profligate spending shows that this has become yet another broken promise.

“It beggars belief that service disruption resulted in TfL shelling out £625 on a single journey, especially when the customer in question could have caught a train to Peterborough and then picked up a £30 taxi to Spalding.”

TfL is £200 million in the red this financial year and is not expected to break even until 2022/23, mainly due to delays in opening Crossrail.

A TfL spokesman said: “We have reviewed our policy on special taxis. All requests are now sent to a senior official in LU for approval.”

Factors such as passenger vulnerability, availability of alternative routes and number of people affected are taken into consideration. The spokesman said LU taxi trips are made with black cabs.

£625 to Spalding those London boys sure know how to Charge

Seriously though there is NO shortage of PH in Peterborough and I'm sure it could have been booked over the phone and probably less than £30 to have one meet the train and nip her home

But then TFL are one of the richest transport undertakings in the world they can afford it

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lack of modern legislation is the iceberg sinking the titanic of the transport sector