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The
November Call Sign penned an article
suggesting that Addison Lee Chairman, John Griffin,
would have been delighted to hear of the abandonment of the M4
bus lane. Our view was that his fleet would then take the same
time returning from Heathrow as licensed taxis did and that he
could at least now tell his passengers that there was now no
difference in the time it took to get back to town between a
licensed taxi and a minicab. Within 48 hours of the decision to scrap the lane, the Crown Prosecution Service announced that they had also dropped the 216 penalty notice fares and 130 court summonses against Addison Lee, leaving John Griffin to claim: "I have no doubt that the decision to scrap the M4 bus lane was at least in part the result of the pressure presented by this case." We agreed with that view, feeling that the Government via the Highways Agency did not want to risk losing a court case, however we suggested it might have been prudent to run more buses along the lane rather than scrap it because there weren’t enough. Former Conservative Minister of Transport for London, Steve Norris, is a Call Sign reader and told one of our drivers that he |
M4 bus lane: Steve Norris tells Call Sign... |
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I DON’T THINK JOHN GRIFFIN HAS WON! |
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 disagreed with the article and that he didn’t consider John Griffin had won – as our headline had claimed. We contacted Steve and he gave us his reasons. "I am sure that what John Griffin wanted was to win on the M4 bus lane (which was frankly hardly enforced at all toward the end) and then fight TfL in the courts over access to bus lanes. By effectively abolishing the bus lane, the DfT have - perhaps unwittingly - removed John Griffin's ability to use that precedent. So he loses big time. "The fact that we will all now get to town from Heathrow roughly at the same time is not |
much of a victory for
Addison Lee, because the minute you hit London bus lanes, the
taxi rightly moves ahead." Mr Norris ended by saying: "Buses and taxis are a function of demand. You can't simply run more buses - presumably empty - just to justify the bus lane." In 1993, Steve Norris as Minister of Transport for London with responsibility for taxis and private hire, launched a Green Paper on the licensing of private hire. The rest, as they say, is history! However, Steve is still an admirer of the taxi system in London and famously told this magazine at the time that PH would never be allowed to pick up in the streets so long as he was a Minister. Soon after Boris Johnson became Mayor, he asked Steve to coordinate between the TfL and London Development Agency boards. As still a member of both, he now helps on occasions when the two bodies occasionally have to negotiate, although not to the extent he used to. |
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