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The 9 December issue
of Taxi Globe contained an article about new electric buses
that John Lewis plan to use for transporting passengers
to/from their Oxford Street store. Charging passengers a £5 fare,
the 9-seater buses are powered by wind-turbine electricity, while
the seats are leather. An added attraction sees the bus fitted with
WiFi and containing laptops for customer’s use. The bus has come from a partnership between John Lewis and Green Urban Transport Sustainable initiative – or GUTSi for short! A John Lewis spokesman claimed the company had been working for four years in developing the idea and has purchased twenty of the coaches at a cost of £150,000 each. The article quoted one unnamed driver as being so upset that he returned his John Lewis store card. Dial-a-Cab’s Sid Nathan (K88) was equally disturbed by the news. He told Call Sign: "John Lewis has the best-served taxi rank in the west end. There are always taxis there and they do a great job in taking passengers wherever |
SID NATHAN SAYS TO THE CAB TRADE... Electric bus? What about the taxi rank??? |
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 Will the bus steal a lot of our work?  Sid
Nathan |
grab a taxi outside the
store’s doors. Why does everybody want a piece of our business; no
one is content just having their own. I can well understand why the
driver returned his store card. " Sid ended by saying: "With 20 buses, this could be a real punch in the mouth for us and when you think about it you have to ask why a store whose job it is to sell items to customers that walk through their doors, should be spending £3million to provide transport for customers who can already get there by bus, tube, taxi or even their own transport? Bus, schmusses, who needs them???" London Mayor, Boris Johnson, said that he was a big fan of electric vehicles that did not belch out fumes via their exhausts and that he would like to see more eco-friendly vehicles on London’s roads. He obviously hasn’t met Sid yet! |
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| they want to go – be that to the other side of London or just Selfridges. Now we hear about this electric bus service. The type of passengers that use buses charging £5 are exactly the type who would normally | ||
