Taxi Driver Online

Chauffeurs could face cap on working hours

Chauffeurs and private hire drivers could face limit on working hours
The Government has launched an investigation into the amount of hours worked by chauffeurs and private hire drivers. Depending on the findings, professional drivers could see a limit put on the amount of hours they are allowed to work in a day. There have been calls from major road safety groups for chauffeurs to come under the drivers’ hours rules, which applies to van, coach and lorry drivers amongst others, but not private hire drivers.

Research conducted by safety group Brake and GMB Union found that on average, private hire drivers and chauffeurs worked 11 hours per day with many feeling obliged to do extra hours when asked by bosses and colleagues. This amounts to drivers working an estimated 70 hours per week which is more than double the amount recommended in European working regulations.

The issue is gathering concern for those within the Government too. Louise Ellman MP acknowledged it as “an area of concern” and has called for the Transport secretary to carry out further research.

However the news has not been welcomed by The Private Hire Board. They argue that it would be unfair to impose a limit on the amount of hours taxi drivers and chauffeurs are allowed to work at a time of economic hardship when many are struggling to scrape a living. They maintain that although many drivers do work 11 hour shifts, they may only spend half of that time on the road as a high percentage of their working day is spent waiting in ranks to pick up fares. In their words new legislation would be an “unnecessary measure.”

Source http://news.limobroker.co.uk/chauffeurs ... urs-13170/


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This issue seems to be gaining momentum,i don't see how they could implement any restrictions.On a personal note it would be great to only do 40 hours a week but unfortunately i cannot afford to.

i sthat me then?

my badge is dual PH/HC, no mention of wearing a cap...

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Of all the things ive lost, i miss my mind the most

I cab see Terry will be making lots of friends in the Chauffeur market if he gets their hours capped.

Just what you need in a recession!

Part of the problem is drivers who don't own there vehicles, they have to pay owners excessive rentals, like for example Edinburgh, where the rental is around £350 a week then there is fuel on top of that,
Only after the drivers has made that, can he or she start to earn a wage.
The same applies to owner drivers who work from an office, radio fees are far to high.
The best way forward would be to close the loophole that allows owners to claim drivers are self employed and make them pay drivers the minimum wage

Im guessing by what ive read from other sources that Taxi drivers are also facing the Wrath of the Happy Clappy brigades purge to save one possible life a year.

If they are so concerned about saving many more lives from vehicle accidents then the happy clappy brigade would better advised to remove every tree and tree stump from within 50 yards of any road, also they could repaint our badly lined roads where they often use broken centre lines which suggest a safe overtaking oppertunity and which are often half way round blind bends rather than simply use a Hazard line, also redesign junctions that have road signs at eye level to both sides so you cant see whats coming and many, many other little common sense things that would save hundreds a life a year.

After that they can leave us well meaning professional driver alone.

Its hard to be forced to have our hours reduced...Vehicle for Vehicle we simply dont make the same kind of profits per hour as the HGV companies that have 32 tons on the back or PSV businesses that can carry 48 passengers in the vehicle. we need to make a living by moving lots and lots of people in small numbers at a time and this takes lots and lots of time, a failure to be allowed to do this would make the job prohibitively expensive or just simply uneconomical.

Its a simple fact that id take 10 hours to transport say 40 people in a 4 seater that a bus would take about an hour to transport, that makes the bus driver 10 times more efficient than me, so if he only worked drove 20 hours a week he could transport several hundred people where in a 48 hour week i might just transport a couple of dozen...and this I do without subsidy or benefit of pre booked work...I may be on shift for 8 hours and only have driven 1 hour of that 8 hour shift. how can that be fair?


oh..and do they know a Taxi from a Ph anyway...


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Could cause this mob trouble. Whose phone numbers are those on the site?

Tried to edit it and sodded it up.

As you were, stand by your beds. My LTDA pal has just sent me a resized one.

BTW any one seen the latest Taxi. Cockney Cabby features.

Who has screwed up the page width on this thread with their post?

Please edit it, if you are guilty.

_________________
Kind regards,

Brummie Cabbie.

Type a message, post your news,
Disagree with other members' views;
But please, do have some decorum,
When debating on the TDO Forum.

The greatest problem with this trade is that 99.9% of drivers DO NOT ENGAGE BRAIN BEFORE SPEAKING.

When drivers tell Joe Publik that they are working 10, 12, 14 or more hours a day & the driver who had a fatal accident which has brought this all about said that he had been working 13 hours when he had that accident, is it little wonder that we get a crescendo building up about driver's hour.

What drivers forget is that if you tell a member of the public that you do 10, 12, 14 hours a day as a cabbie or PH, they immediately think that you have been driving all those hours. And not being professional drivers themselves & perhaps (like my brother-in-law does) would take two stops at motorway services on a journey from Birmingham to London, because they get tired, the general public would immediately believe that these hours were excessive.

But the general public are not professional drivers conditioned to driving for a living. And when you train (by way of working at a job) you become conditioned to that job. Most professional drivers can do 8 – 10 hours at the job without a blink of an eye, because they have been ‘conditioned’ to driving for a living. Yet ask a secretary to do those same hours driving a car & she would be totally exhausted. Conversely, when that secretary started her career, she could probably only type 25-30 words a minute, but can now do 80-100 words a minute, because she has become conditioned to that speed or output. Again ask a cabbie to do her job as a secretary all day long & he /she would be knackered at the end of the day & the secretary would laugh, because for her it would be a doddle.

I don’t suppose for one minute that the driver who was involved in the fatal accident that started this ball rolling & confessed to having ‘worked’ for 13 hours when he had that accident had the gumption to qualify that statement & state how many of those 13 hours he had actually driven for & how many hours he had been resting or on standby. Even if he did not know, he could have worked those times out approximately by referring to the operator’s jobs log & calculated his approximate driving time on that day.

I work a split shift week, Monday to Thursday on days, Friday a split shift, but mainly nights, Saturday night & the very occasional Sunday, but only if there is an event on & I know I’m going to earn well. In the summer of 2007, when work was getting progressively worse, I decided to do my own VERY ACCURATE LOG for five weeks of all the jobs I did in that time. I made out a form on the computer using Microsoft Excel & printed off 35 sheets, one for each day. I then logged what time I came out each morning, logged every job start time & end time, logged all breaks I had during the day & then logged the time I returned home. A great deal of work, but ‘oh boy’ did it open my eyes to how totally unproductive I was. I have printed off the results of that personal driver hours survey of mine, just to refresh my mind & the results & percentages were as follows;

Average daily gross shift time = 12 hours 16 minutes
Average daily work break time = 3 hours 51 minutes
Average daily net shift time = 8 hours 24 minutes
Average daily time spend ‘For Hire’ = 5 hours 29 minutes
Average daily time spent ‘Hired’ = 2 hours 55 minutes
Average daily number of hirings = 13.9
Percentage of total time spent ‘Hired’ = 34.73%
Percentage of total time spent ‘For Hire’ = 65.27%

Now let us use my figures for the driver that admitted to having ‘been on call’ for 13 hours when he had the fatal accident & presume that he had a similar work pattern. This equates to 65.27% (time spent ‘For Hire’ above) of 13 hours = 8 hours 29 minutes spent not driving in the 13 hours that he admitted to having ‘driven’ for.

The problem is that Joe Publik thinks that we drive all the time that we are working & that just is not the case, even in the really good times. The more serious issue is how many drivers, especially on PH have a daytime job, in a factory, family run shop or whatever, who are not professional drivers but supplement their income after doing a days work at ‘the proper job’ & then are truly tired when they start their part-time job as a licensed driver, working the lucrative weekday evenings & all weekend. That is where I believe there is a real problem & what I find really irritating is that these non-professional, part-time drivers create the sh*t for the full time professional drivers.

I just wonder if the driver involved in the fatal accident that killed the lad on his 18th birthday & who then admitted to having worked 13 hours was a full time professional driver, or had ‘a proper job’ during the week & was a part-time licensed driver. I believe the accident happened at the weekend, but I may be wrong.

_________________
Kind regards,

Brummie Cabbie.

Type a message, post your news,
Disagree with other members' views;
But please, do have some decorum,
When debating on the TDO Forum.

was thinking that

CC

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

London guy's need to see the site in all its panoramic glory.

Just live with it as soon as the web site owner sees it he will scream for it to be taken down

It will be off shortly, and posably you dont post things without resizing them it fecks the page up

I'm coming up with a London Taxi site using that website address.

http://www.thelondontaxi.co.uk/index.html

Sorry Jock didn’t mean to step on your sporran.

The minicab site is run by Cockney cabby, moved on from his wedding only cab service, eh.

The owner of the minicab site is the RMT guy
Can’t resize it is as it comes as it comes. Cockney cabby and RMT guy tried to pull the site down but it is here for all to see.

Toots sort her out