Taxi Driver Online

Firstly is this a case of the council trying to jump the gun on the new cab act ?

Secondly I cannot see why someone would drive all the way from one end of the county to a little market town like Barnard castle to work it would probably cost more in fuel than they would make I doubt this would make much differance because most drivers would want to stick to their patch where they know the locality well and probably many of the regular customers

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

And I could imagine the trade saying f*** off.

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IDFIMH

These one colour policies really do seem daft to me though. The council in Bristol made all the hackney drivers there repaint their cars blue. As far as I know they had to do it at their own expense and when it really came down to it, the whole thing was just the idea of some jobsworth with a marketing degree who worked for the city council.

And I don't buy this "easier to identify" argument. If you can't identify a hackney carriage by its shape, the big TAXI sign above the windscreen and the fact that most of them sound like bloody great amoured personnel carriers then frankly you're too daft to be out in public in the first place.

I think all PH should be pink and all hacks any colour

They wouldn't drive from one end of the county to a little market town to work, but, under the current zoning system if they drove a passenger from their zone to the little market town they had to drive back to their zone without any chance of a passenger even if there is one at said little market town

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Note to self: Just because it pops into my head does NOT mean it should come out of my mouth!!

You are assuming that all hackney carriages are the same type of vehicle when in fact, apart from mainly big city's, hackney carriages can be any vehicle whatso ever (with some restrictions).

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Grandad,

Don't all authorities require wheelchair accessible vehicles?

Not all wheelchair accessable vehicles look like TXs. Mine is a Renault Master.

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Grandad,

Ah right, I see what you mean. Sure, the shape and noise aspects I pointed out only apply to LTIs but surely you still have a taxi sign and don't generally have problems with people on the street being able to recognise your vehicle as a taxi?

The point I was trying to make was that councils justify these one colour policies by claiming that it makes taxis easier for people to recognise. That implies that taxis are difficult for people to recognise when they are different colours, which I feel just insults peoples' intelligence.

As I pointed out, in the case of Bristol the origin of the policy there would actually seem to have been some folks with too much time on their hands in the council thinking that it would be a lovely idea for all the taxis to be "Bristol blue", and to hell with the taxi drivers who have to pay for this out of their own pockets.

Frankly I think that local authorities who insist on these one colour policies are over stepping the mark and taking advantage of drivers who already have enough to worry about.

I suspect they would never, ever try to enforce something like that in Belfast, since many of the public hire drivers here belong to a taxi association and even those who don't generally know each other and speak with one voice, so the council has to actually consider the views of drivers instead of just throwing its weight around as many others do.