Taxi Driver Online

are taxi meter companies regulated by LAs . our LA has increased our tariff , ihave to pay £25 to have my meter upgraded , by a local trader . does he pay the council for a license to do this ? or can i find a way to do it myself?

£25 doesn't sound unreasonable to me. I was £30 last year.

Short answer is probably not. Meter agents have to get the tariff chip from the manufacturer to change the settings per your council's requirements. Each chip is unique to your council's tariff.
Another agent probably won't have the correct chip.

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There may be more than one authorised agent for your LA. There is here. They will tell you if you ask them.

Don't know if every council is the same, but here all they're bothered about is that the meter shows the information required and is calibrated correctly and this is checked by the coucil garage.

Thus you could turn up with any meter calibrated by anyone, and the council would be unconcerned how that came about as long as it passed the test.

The meters and their calibration is basically down to you, the meter manufacturer and their agents - the council are irrelevant at that stage.

Yes, it's same here.
Authorised agents are the stumbling block.

One of my mates has a Wayfarer Taxisim. He gets the new tariff sent to him through the post, on a little sim card like the one in a mobile phone.
Not sure how much it costs though.

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The council only checks if the meter is calibrated correctly, how you do that is up to you.

Regards

JD

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Can't see why you can't do it yourself. The council will check it out in the same way as if the meter company altered it.

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IDFIMH

Your local meter man is licensed by the company that makes the meters, when a new tariff is applied for he contacts the company and they send him a little gizmo that he put's into the meter, and it resets the meter to the new tariff.

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Justice for the 96. It has only taken 27 years...........repeat the same lies for 27 years and the truth sounds strange to people!

I think the calibrating gizmo you talk about is standard and the whole think works on downloadable software, the chip in the meter is writeable and all that's needed is for the gizmo to be inserted into the meter and reprogram the chip. Is that about right?

Regards

JD

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Thats about it. The problem is getting a hold of the gizmo and the correct program. I think they are only available to their agents.

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I think that also sounds about right. The software is downloadable from the net I believe but you have to have the correct program installed on your computer, which obviously comes from the the chip supplier. You also need authorisation to access the download section of their website to retrieve the software.

Regards

JD

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Copyright notice © The contents of this post are copyright of JD and are not to be reproduced outside of TDO without written permission.

Ours have to be set and calibrated by pitts taximeters in Nottingham. We are given (charged for) a certificate of calibration by Pitts and this has to be given to the council.

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Grandad,

thanks for your help .

i am a little wiser on the subject now.

thank you

Don't know if they're all the same, but the Digitax agent sticks the gizmo into the meter - which I think is merely required to gain access to the calibration variables - but he then inputs the data manually.

Each tariff has has numerous different variables, and what he does is change the relevant variable with the new variables, and they are supplied by Digitax head office.

For example, variable 1 might be the flagfall yardage, variable 2 might be the flagfall price, variable 3 might be the subsequent increment in yards, variable 4 might be charge for the subsequent increments, variable 5 might be the waiting time increment in seconds etc.

For example

1 might be keyed in as 800 (yards)
2 might be keyed in as 220 (pence)
3 might be keyed in as 240 (yards)
4 might be keyed in as 20 (pence)

Then obviously the meter uses all this data to calculate the fare.

The meter has the potential to use dozens of variables, but since the Fife tariff is fairly straightforward only a handful of them are used.

Obviously if the agent just gets one digit wrong, then the meter could read ridiculous amounts - for example, if the third variable as entered as 24 rather than 240 and if the fourth variable was entered as 200 rather than 20 then the meter would be clocking up £2.00 every 24 yards rather than 20p every 240 yards