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Christmas coverage I am writing this in the first week of December due to the Editor wanting everything in early, thanks to the Christmas holidays and the extended closure of most businesses - including our printers. The problem I have is that it is only just over a week since the December edition of Call Sign appeared and I believe this year (when you read this, still probably 2009) is the first time over the past thirteen years that I have not had to appeal to everyone regarding the coverage in the run up to Christmas. At the time of writing, everything is going quite well - except for the traffic, which has been horrendous.
Contract extensions 2012 Olympics I have recently attended two |
 meetings and there are more scheduled for the future with both - yes two - of the Olympic committees! The first is with the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) and the second with London Organising Committee Olympic Games (LOCOG). They are two different organisations and as their names suggests, one has to organise the Games while the other makes sure that everything gets built and delivered. Transport comes under the ODA. While the meetings were very enlightening, they were also quite disappointing from the taxi industry’s point of view. However it did give us the opportunity to put our suggestions to both committees, which they say they will consider. You may be aware that there will be a high-speed train travelling from St Pancras to the Olympic Park, which I believe is called the Javelin. The journey time between the two stations will be seven minutes and I suspect that many people will opt for this mode of transport. However, I suspect St Pancras will be extremely busy when the public returns from the Olympic Park and we have suggested there should be taxi marshals there as there are currently at Paddington and Euston. The numbers involved are quite incredible; an estimated 800,000 people per day attending in three sessions in a 24hr period, 25,000 from the media, 18,000 from the Olympic |
family and 6,000 from the Paralympic
family! I have also been informed that there will be tens of thousands of unpaid volunteers working at the Games and on the periphery. There will be 3,000 volunteers driving a fleet of BMWs for transporting competitors and officials to and from the Olympic Park and these will be the only vehicles permitted to use the Olympic Route Network (ORN). Of course we objected to this, especially regarding the Paralympic Games, as probably many spectators will be disabled in some way and require our taxis. Regarding the Olympic routes themselves, there will be certain times of the day when only the official Olympic traffic will be allowed in these lanes. I must say I was quite surprised to find out these routes/lanes will be on the offside of any dual carriageway, including places such as the Marylebone Road. If I can be a little more explicit, if there were three lanes, slow, fast and overtaking lane, then the Olympic Route will be the overtaking lane, so nothing else will be allowed in that lane during certain times – what can I say? There will be more meetings and hopefully these will take some of the taxi industry’s suggestions on board, but it does seem at the moment that they have pretty set views on how things will work. As a personal opinion, I believe it may be almost impossible to persuade the ODA to allow taxis to use the Olympic routes – but we will see! It certainly won’t be for the lack of trying. Finally, I would like to wish everyone a healthy New Year and hopefully a little more prosperous one than 2009. Brian Rice |
