Taxi Demo

Page may contain affiliate links. Please see terms for details.

martint235

Dog on a bike
Location
Welling
In case anyone isn't aware yet there will be another black taxi demo in central London this afternoon. They are protesting about minicabs and say that they don't want to block the roads but they feel that passengers' safety is being put at risk.

I'd hate to be cynical but I think it's more about their incomes being lost than passenger safety.

Not a big fan of black cab drivers and find it very hard to feel any sympathy for them but that's just me :smile:
 

zimzum42

Legendary Member
It is totally about their income being lost - and fair enough IMO, they do not provide a service commensurate with the price they charge.

Their only differentiator is the knowledge, and now we have sat navs, that's redundant...

Also, their main complaint is about mincabs touting at night, so what do they do? Hold up the traffic in the middle of the day...
 
Little sympathy maybe but I have more sympathy with black cab drivers than those private hire drivers that are happy to ignore the rules and transport passengers without proper insurance, so what other rules do they flout?
 

zimzum42

Legendary Member
All drivers, whether minicab or black cab, should follow the rules.

Black cab drivers are forever breaking the rules anyway, stopping where they shouldn't, leaving cab unattended on ranks, sitting in the ASL, loads of things, they are no better than minicab drivers.

We need to make sure the rules are adhered to, and IMO we should change the rules so that mincabs can wait on ranks and also pick up when hailed...
 

Dan B

Disengaged member
zimzum42 said:
It is totally about their income being lost - and fair enough IMO, they do not provide a service commensurate with the price they charge.

Their only differentiator is the knowledge, and now we have sat navs, that's redundant...
Hardly. Having a satnav really isn't a substitute for knowing the roads - they don't know about roadworks, or congestion, or demonstrations and closed roads, and they get confused by tall buildings. And I'd much rather the driver was watching the road than trying to type my postcode in on an LCD suckered to the windscreen
 

Jezston

Über Member
Location
London
coruskate said:
Hardly. Having a satnav really isn't a substitute for knowing the roads - they don't know about roadworks, or congestion, or demonstrations and closed roads, and they get confused by tall buildings. And I'd much rather the driver was watching the road than trying to type my postcode in on an LCD suckered to the windscreen

Quite. The 'official' green-cab taxi drivers around Nottingham rely entirely on Sat Nav, seem to have no local knowledge whatsoever and they are all utterly useless. I even had one refuse to take me to a destination 5 minutes drive away because I couldn't give him a postcode, despite me being able to show him the location on a map. Pretty much every journey I ever have in one involves excrutiating explainations of the destination, usually to be taken a ridiculously long route there or just dropped off in entirely the wrong place.

The knowledge is important.

Having said all that, you'd still be asking a lot for me to have much sympathy towards any taxi drivers as a cyclist.
 
Who's going to notice a taxi demo? Line of black cabs in the road with drivers shouting obscenities, racist abuse and ill-informed, bigoted comments? How is that any different from any other day?
 
Forgive me if this is one demo I don't support.
 

Guvnor

Active Member
Location
Essex
martint235 said:
In case anyone isn't aware yet there will be another black taxi demo in central London this afternoon. They are protesting about minicabs and say that they don't want to block the roads but they feel that passengers' safety is being put at risk.

I'd hate to be cynical but I think it's more about their incomes being lost than passenger safety.

Not a big fan of black cab drivers and find it very hard to feel any sympathy for them but that's just me :biggrin:


and whats wrong with that? I think they have a point. Why should they have to go to college, be out learning the routes day and night for 3 years to learn the knowledge, sit through exams on top of that and then roll over and let some illegal cab take there punters? The majority of cabs they are complaining about are illegal, have no insurance, MOT and sometimes even no license and are taking away alot of peoples livelyhoods that they have to work hard for. So before we all start complaining about them holding up a little bit of traffic, try and look at it from there point of view. Not all black taxi drivers are peanuts, you get some good and some bad.......just the same as cyclists.
 
Top Bottom