Taxi Driver Online

Council chiefs have declared war on cabs dumped at Glasgow roadsides.

Parking bosses believe some firms are using the cars as “billboards on wheels”, leaving them at prominent city locations in full corporate livery, complete with phone numbers.

Now they have quietly started impounding the vehicles. Officials have seized two taxis covered in adverts for south side business Hampden Cars, one of the biggest private hire firms in Glasgow.

The vehicles are currently unclaimed at the council’s pound in Bridgeton. Council officials, however, today stressed that Hampden Cars was not the only firm whose liveried taxis had been found at the side of the road.

A spokesman said: “A number of businesses make use of trailers and other vehicles as makeshift advertising and, while some are sited off street – presumably with a landowner’s permission – others are, frankly, abandoned in public places and on busy streets.

“Clearly, that has a knock-on effect on traffic and the local area – sometimes monopolising available parking space and sometimes simply having a negative effect on the surroundings, as the vehicles deteriorate over time.

“These are not, generally, parking offences – they are abandoned vehicles and they are dealt with as such.”

Council officials believe dumping cars on the roadside – even for marketing purposes – effectively amounts to corporate flytipping. They fear such vehicles could be torched – or pose some other health and safety hazard to the public.

Charlie Gordon MSP, a former council leader whose Glasgow constituency has been littered with vehicles and abandoned trailers, said he was fed-up with the nuisance.

Mr Gordon said: “This really is an objectionable practice.

“Any legitimate company that is advertising knows that it must obtain planning permission to put up big ads or billboards.

Nobody from Hampden Cars was available for comment.

It is not clear whether the company owns the vehicles abandoned in its livery.

The unclaimed hackneys are expected to be destroyed.


http://www.eveningtimes.co.uk/news/edit ... -1.1047295

My, they must be posh gits up there....down here its invariably an old abandoned white transit van that someone has daubed a rough advert on wi a 6" bristle Brush...

Its usually old hackney cabs they use, or an old saloon car, they have never used licensed vehicles as far as I have seen on trips to the big smoke