Taxi Driver Online

Queues of black crows


Taxis are filthy and wasteful. It's no good pretending they're some kind of public service

Peter Preston
Monday December 4, 2006
The Guardian


So London's tiny congestion area gradually morphs into a "low emission zone" - and then to an Eddington zone, bringing road charging to all of Britain. So Manchester, Birmingham and the rest of the big city brigade prepare for their own trials by cashpoint. Fine: but pause for a moment over a missing link in this transport masterplan. Walk with me to Paddington station one dark and stormy winter evening.

The line of taxis starts long before you can see the station slip road. There are 54, 55, 56 and stop-counting ... of them. A fraction of the capital's 20,000 black cabs, but they all have their diesel engines running. And the air is rank with fumes, a hacking cough of carbon calamity.

Which isn't surprising: the average untreated Metrocab pothers more death and destruction than a Land Rover Freelander or Citroen C8 people-carrier (a kindly Guardian blogger informs me). But it still makes you wonder what Britain's love affair with taxi travel is all about.

Of course Ken Livingstone knows that black cabs are bad for your health. "Taxis are responsible for 24% of fine particle and 12% of nitrogen oxide of road transport emissions in the centre of London," he says. Cue around 1,600 extra deaths a year.

That's why, towards the end of his second term, the mayor will be doing something about them. From the middle of 2008, he wants new, cleaner cabs or older ones fitted with abatement technology or running on alternative fuels. Customers have been paying for that with an extra 20p slice on fares since 2005. Nirvana, some 18 months hence, will make matters "up to 37% better", claims Ken. "London," adds the relevant transport director, "already has the best taxi service in the world, and before long it'll have the cleanest."

Meanwhile, though, welcome back to Paddington, where the smog grows denser. Does 15% of all fine particle transport emissions - as reduced - sound wonderful? Or 8% of nitrogen oxide? Isn't there still a problem here: a taxi problem?

I know that London has the best taxi service in the world, because Transport for London keeps telling me so. I also know, from taking cabs elsewhere, that it seems to have the most expensive taxi service in the world.

What I don't know is how much thought has gone into taxi futures. The official mantra makes them a vital public service: able to share bus lanes with bendy monsters and, on occasion, to hold them up while a passenger scrabbles for change. They exist, it's argued, for tourists, the sick and the old who can't manage without them. They deserve special status and treatment.

But look at just a few of their most regular customers, who don't precisely fit that bill. Ken Livingstone himself ran up £3,000 in taxi expenses in a year before he saw the light and throttled back. A usually unreliable source (the Sun) calculates that the BBC is paying £55,000 a day in taxi and car hire (last year £14.4m went on taxi fares alone). A possibly more reliable source (the Times, briefed by Tory backbenchers who demanded written answers) reports that Gordon Brown and his Treasury team spent £178,000 on taxis last year - a modest extra alongside £755,000 on air tickets, but still a walloping nitrogen oxide blast.

Can any big city do without them? Not entirely, to be sure. They plug gaps in the system. But you don't need to have the noxious 20,000 crawling round empty for much of the day. Nor do you need the chugging queues outside stations from Temple Meads to Lime Street, just more settled, silent ranks. And, as for expense, why not try a modicum of old-fashioned egalitarian pain?

If black cabs are vital for the elderly and disabled, then why expect them to pay as much as a fit chancellor or a departing chairman of the BBC? A card helps pensioners pay less on trains and buses: a card could do just as well on cabs (which take American Express anyway). What "public service" uses flat rates alone? And if that leaves a shortfall, then go the Chelsea tractor route and load costs on the top end of the income scale.

The basic point on the low emission scale is that we've never rethought taxi use, merely tinkered with what exists. In or out of bus lanes? Permission to drive with a mini mapping computer? Built uniformly big to hold five when only one wants to travel? Able to run and run empty? For richer, for poorer? For Chingford as well as Chelsea? Welcome to the pondering zone. p.preston@guardian.co.uk

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... 17,00.html

_________________
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
George Carlin

Gosh, what a mish mash. But thought provoking nevertheless CC.

Vehicles are tosh. LTI has long suffered from a lack of competition. In Edinburgh we've recently introduced the E7. The answer to all taxis' woes? Perhaps not, but a step in the right direction. Clearly we should be using the widest range of vehicles, each used to service nivhe markets, each with the construction economies of scale which can factor in the highest standards of vehicle emission control. That's the green way.

As for the rest, the trade has become like the dinosuars. It is refusing, or at least stoically resisting all attempts, to modernise. But if we don't, then like the dinosaurs we're going to disappear off our customers', and politicians, radar.

It's time for us to get real, and for those who work in the trade to think beyond the end of their bonnet and get involved in that which they earn their living.

Keep scratching CC. Perhaps the itch will go away. We'd all benefit from it.

Any article from the Guardian will be from one of the tree hugging brigade who wears mokasins and enviromentaly friendly socks.

So TM posts an article a couple of days back from amother paper saying you can't get a Taxi for love nor money, now the leftie's telling us: [quote=] Walk with me to Paddington station one dark and stormy winter evening.

The line of taxis starts long before you can see the station slip road. [/quote]

Clearly this man has never taken a Taxi on an evening like he mentions, as there would be no que on the rank.

The rank is always moving, that's why the Taxi's have their engines running.




Does'nt that just ooze of Guardian Man?

Tell you what mate, take the bus or cycle.
I wonder if he gas a wind turbine?