Bus Lanes:
What's Ken Up to Now?
Ken Livingstone : Is he up
to something?
Ken Livingstone recently made his regular monthly LBC Radio
appearance to answer caller’s questions. Nothing unusual in that and he
usually gets an interesting selection of problems to go through.
However, on January 19 Call Sign’s phone became red hot after a
stream of drivers phoned to ask whether we had heard the minicab driver
who had called in and asked the Mayor of London why, as he was now a
licensed private hire driver, could he not use bus lanes along with taxis?
It wasn’t the question that worried them, but the answer when Ken
told the London audience:
"Hang on for about two years
|
and you’ll be in them!"
Every driver who called us made the same point – if minicabs are
allowed in bus lanes alongside us, how long before the bus companies
complain that the lanes are becoming too crowded and then both minicabs and
Taxis will be banned?
One driver also called to say that he’d had a conversation with a
Scotland Yard officer who had told him that Taxis would soon only be able to
use bus lanes when they had a fare in their cab, otherwise they would have
to follow the exclusion notices.
So far as we were concerned, the Mayor’s two-year message to the
minicab driver meant nothing. We also asked the LTDA’s Steve McNamara for
his view. He told Call Sign:
"Ken Livingstone comes up with ideas like that all the time, but
few materialise. I wouldn’t read too much into it because I just don’t
believe that the bus companies would have it. You wouldn’t be able to move
in the bus lanes! I find his decision to review their licensing procedures
for limousines and taxi-bikes etc more worrying than his answer to this bus
lane question."
And Steve’s view on only taxis with passengers using bus lanes?
"A load of boll… sorry, tommyrot!" |
