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It's 4.30pm and I'm putting my home made soup into a flask, cutting some bread and making up a second flask of coffee Once I have finished I head off down to the taxi rank to make my living As the rush hour is approaching hopefully some people will get taxis home I've been out working during the day and have taken a £4.50, £7 and £6.80 fare so that's an 18.30 start to the day.
Now I have been on the rank an hour and 15 minutes during rush hour and finally worked my way up to the front A girl gets my taxi and asks to go up the road a few hundred yards to a bank She's probably about 10 years younger than me and I would have thought that such a short journey wouldn't have required a taxi However.. her fare was £2.85, she gave me exactly the correct change and wished me an excellent day in her 'posh' London accent.
On arriving back at the rank there are now about 8 taxis in front of me Most of these cabs are not from this city and a fair number of them were foreign, mostly of Asian origin I'm not bringing race into it for the sake of it, but many the out of town drivers I have spoken to have a very poor grasp of the English language and don't know the area very well. I think that both are an absolute necessity in this business.
one of these guys turned away a fare to John Street - he didn't know where it was!
It's 6.14pm now and I could be here a while and I'm wondering who these people are ahead of me in the queue, where have they come from? Are they registered for income tax? How did they pass the locality test if they cannot speak English? I asked one of them if he wanted to go halves on a pizza one night - a two for one offer He had to ask his friend to help him read the pizza menu Yet this man has the same right as me to drive his taxi in this city.
Could I have refused the girl earlier and told her that she could walk quicker, and that I wanted a bigger fare? Nope.. it's not legal is it? The other day one of these guys turned away a fare to John Street because 'he didn't know where it was'!!! It was actually only a few hundred metres up the road It was pouring with rain, the girl had a laptop and didn't want the rain to damage it I just took her there anyway If she had got in the car and said "John Street Darlington" - the driver would not have known where that was either, but I'm sure he would have started his engine and took her - because it's a bigger fare!
On the topic of fares our country is not FAIR! It seems to be far too easy for foreign drivers who can't speak a reasonable level of English to get in a cab and take passengers without proper local area knowledge Also, are they all paying their taxes the same as us local cabbies? Who knows, but it would seem that the councils are just issuing plates to anyone that comes along these days regardless of whether or not they can provide a proper service to passengers!
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Despite this, there are some excellent taxi drivers about too who are chatty and pleasant.
The problem then becomes "private hire" as opposed to "licensed taxi". I took a private hire car in London (because it was raining there were no free taxis in sight) from Hammersmith to Waterloo station. The driver didn't know the way! No, he wasn't from Eastern Europe, he was from Manchester but had only been in London for three days!
anonymous visitor