Back Again
Well, that month off seemed to fly by
even quicker than last years! But for
those interested, it certainly wasn’t
wasted. For three of the four weeks,
Linda and I just took it easy in a
lovely cottage in a small village near
St Austell in Cornwall visiting
attractions such as the Eden Project,
the lost gardens of Heligan and lots of
small, sandy beaches etc. Yep, it wasn’t
Spain, Italy, Cyprus or Turkey, but we
loved it. Whilst there, in addition to
celebrating our wedding anniversary, it
was also my 35th year as a
licensed taxi driver.
So what have I come back to in a similar vein? Well how about this
being my one hundredth issue as Editor!
I find it hard to believe, but it’s
true. So on this rather special issue
(at least to me), I’d like to thank a
few people who have helped me along the
way. There is the former Editor
and proprietor of Taxi Globe, Rodney
Lewis who sat down with me following my
first issue and pointed out where I
could learn and where I could just
improve. There was also my good
friend Al Fresco, who as Editor of both
London Taxi Times and Mountview News at
the time, also gave me both verbal and
practical advice which helped put me on
(I hope) the right road.
Of course there are the never-ending list of people who write for
Call Sign with just the
merest hint of me nagging. Without them,
I’d have a much thinner mag!
There’s also former Editor Jery Craig’s
brilliant cartoons, Alan Green’s
camerawork and his reliability in
covering stuff for me that I can’t get
to.
I must also thank the BoM without whose freedom, Call Sign
would be a totally different magazine
and, I believe, nowhere near as good. I
sincerely hope that the future is as
good as the past…
Seeing isn’t believing…
DaC driver
Bernie Silver (G08) called me some
time ago and asked an extremely
pertinent question: "Aren’t there a lot
of empty private hire vehicles floating
around?" The reason it was pertinent was
because it was very busy out there. "Do
you think," asked Bernie, "that some
licensed minicab drivers might have an
ulterior motive for having the roundel
on the front and back of their
vehicle?"
I knew what he meant, but wasn’t expecting the answer to get into
my taxi from one of our largest
accounts! The passenger was extremely
nice. I’d picked him up once before to
take him to
northwest London and again set him down
at the same place. |
Close
by was a nice car with the
now-recognisable roundel licence at both
ends. "Minicab driver moved in," I
enquired, "he must be doing better than
me to move in around here," I laughed! I
was shocked when he told me that the car
was his and that he had not the time or
desire to become a minicab driver, but
that he had been told it would be easy
for him to get the licence because his
father actually drove a minicab for a
company in Camden – and apparently it
was.
"But if you don’t use it as a minicab," I asked naively, "why do
you want the licence?"
"Well," he replied without the slightest hint of embarrassment,
"although I use cabs quite often to go
there and back to the office, the
licence means that whenever I use the
car to go either to work or to a
meeting, I don’t have to pay any
congestion charge!"
I don’t blame this guy for taking advantage of a system that is in
place, but I can’t help wondering about
Bernie’s question and its obvious
inference: How many private hire
vehicles are really not private hire
vehicles, but just using it as an excuse
to save up to £40 a week? In exchange,
it costs them the annual licence and two
compulsory MOTs a year. That leaves them
well in pocket.
I’m not going to say who he is or what account he comes out of
because I don’t think he is actually
doing anything wrong - if he thought he
was he wouldn’t have been so open.
However, I wonder if the PCO realise
what is happening with regard to those
who use their licence purely to avoid
paying the congestion charge?
Yellow boxes
Many years ago
when life was far simpler, a folk singer
called Pete Seeger recorded a
song called Little Boxes. He
sang: "There’s a blue one and a yellow
one and they're all made out of ticky
tacky." Perhaps he was right after all…?
There was an interesting article in The Times (9 June) that
claimed cameras at yellow box junctions
which catch motorists on film who are
stuck in them with noexit and then fine
them £100, |
are in fact increasing congestion rather
than speeding it up. And naturally, we
believe them that speeding the traffic
flow is their aim rather than just
gathering in as much income as they can!
Over the past two years, over 100,000 motorists have been caught
within the yellow peril and have had to
cough up the dough. While TfL claimed
that they were doing it purely for the
sake of keeping London’s traffic
flowing, we couldn’t say too much. After
all, gridlock is nothing to write home
about!
But TfL has now looked at the results because they obviously wanted
to hold them up to show their detractors
how successful they had been and have
had to admit that they show around 150
fewer cars each hour are getting across
the box junctions and that has slowed
down - rather than speeded up - the
flow.
So why hasn’t it worked? The obvious reason is TfL’s Big Brother
purge where cameras originally designed
to help prevent terrorism, are now also
being used to bolster their funds and as
a consequence drivers are holding back,
rather than take a chance of being
caught in the box.
Of course, we could have told them the above without their wasting
many man-hours on the survey. But have
you ever tried telling Transport for
London anything? Inside this issue, DaC
driver David Baker (D22) gives
his view and asks: Do we need TfL?
Roy Ellis
Roy Ellis, Head of
the PCO, has announced his retirement
from that position at the end of the
year. I doubt whether any holder of that
position could ever drown in a sea of
popularity, but I have to say that
whenever Call Sign has
asked him a question for the magazine,
an answer always appears. In addition,
he always has a ready smile and can
never be accused of hiding himself away.
Certainly, under his administration, more changes have taken place
than in the previous 350 years, but I
suspect that the more unpopular ones
will have TfL stamped on them! I wish
him a very happy retirement…
Last word
Several drivers
have asked me about the performance of
DAB digital radios in cabs, so I
promised to ask the people who know –
you! If you’ve had problems, let me know
what they were and then we’ll all know…
Alan Fisher
callsignmag@aol.com |
