George Pflaum is a German citizen and Munich taxi
driver. He owns his own cab and drives it around München five nights a
week. Having read Allen Togwell's 'Sales and Marketing' report in the
August Call Sign which made mention of Allen's time in Germany, in this
article George adds to the story...
ALLEN TOGWELL - THE GERMAN REPLY |
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My name is George Werner Pflaum and I am a board member of the Munich
Taxicab Association (Taxivereinigung München). I agree with most
of what Allen Togwell said in his excellent article. The German regulatory
authorities are pretty strict, however, the laws and city by-laws are a
lot harsher than the reality.
It Looks Tough But... |
to nil, making regulatory
authorities and taxi associations pay the lost court hearings plus the
defendants' lawyers! You can imagine that we really have to have a strong case against an offender to be willing to go through this lengthy procedure (it can take years to remove multiple offenders from the taxi business). Now, I don't want to overdo my criticism of the local system, but I would like to show you it's shortcomings. Generally speaking, the taxicab industry is in relatively good shape here. We envy the London cabbies for their 'Knowledge' over here, though. It is not uncommon in Germany, that cab drivers do not have a clue of where they are going. The theoretical tests are tough, but the practice test is completely absent. There is a medical and psychological examination as well plus a few questions on tariffs. Parking On Cab Ranks |
in no-parking zones are
relatively low. This means, that we still have a lot of people parking
in our taxi ranks / stands. If you are a local, you would also know
where the police regularly check and write tickets, so you could still
park your Beemer or Benz in other cab stands or no-parking zones etc.
Theoretically, the system is nice. In practice, it doesn't work quite as
well with still thousands of cars driving around in the cities looking
for legal, semi-legal or illegal parking in the streets. I wrote this reply just to make you feel better and to give you a better understanding of our realities which are sometimes contrary to the law's and cities' intentions. For those of you on Dial-a-Cab in London wishing to know more about the German taxi industry, I can recommend the following two websites (German language with the babelfish translation utility): Taxipress de: http://www.taxipress.de/ 'Ventil' Taximagazin: http://www.ventil-taximagazin.com George W. Pflaum |
