Taxi Driver Online

So, in the future, licensed taxis will probably have to become wheelchair accessible. Ok, fine. But what choices will we have over the next few years?

Surely the government must now put pressure on all car makers to come up with vehicles that can be used for proper wheelchair access.

Surely it is only fair that if such conditions are imposed on the trade...which I have no doubt whatsoever will cause great hardship to a lot of taxi drivers as providing such a vehicle is not a one off but an ongoing matter......then the government must in turn demand that all the car makers provide such vehicles. After all if the manufacturers are not at present providing such vehicles then they must be discriminating against wheelchair users?

BTW... I am a ex user of a previous forum whereby my name, location and interest in the trade was freely available. However, from this experience I will now remain anonymous.

Yes, make all private cars WAVs as well, Mr Scanner.

After all, if you want a WAV, you can't just pop down to Evans and Son's car lot, that must be discriminatory, surely?

And what about ministerial cars, I don't see any WAVs, that must be discriminating against David Blunkett and Anne Begg (wheelchair bound), surely?

It would certainly bring the price of WAVs down

Dusty

I fully expect the prices of WAVs to come down, or at least not get up to the stupid LTI prices.

But at the end of the day, who is going to have to pay for all this? Not me, but customers.

So if your outgoings are going to increase, then it's down to councils to make sure your incomings are meeting them.

So when your council start putting into place new WAV conditions (if you haven't already), make sure that report also has a fare review to compensate for it.

What gets my goat is that my Council of quite a large City has just replaced its mayoral vehicle with a people carrier..... does it have wheechair access...does it ^(%^^$%!!!!

Quite right, Mr Guest, the politicians who foist these policies on to everyone else should at least show a good example.

Dusty

Trouble is that many of them will see that some WAV areas have quite low fare structures.

But they probably also have a much larger PH sector as a consequence, and WAVs will be much harder to come by in busy periods, which helps neither the able bodied nor disabled HC user.

Anyway, let's face it, looking at fares throughout the country you'd be forgiven for thinking that they'd been drawn out of a hat.

Who knows, post-OFT we may end up with more uniform fare structures (regional or someting like that) and then these things can be thought about on a more rational basis.

But the DDA and suchlike looks at these things too narrowly.

Dusty

Which brings us nicely to another point.

The layout of taxis has remained the same for over 60 years since the first design, the government have been intervening to have more choice but have come up against the big issue.

how do you persuade investment ahead of demand? now the government are creating the demand.

all wav prices are based on the purpose built taxi, look, compare a wav hackney against its private hire wav counterpart, they are a third dearer, and wav alternartives a third cheaper than purpose built, big gaps in prices there, I would say its a racket.

there needs to be big changes in the future pricing mechanism.

Troy

Im just dreading the time when all taxis are wheel chair acceptable.
See if we have to put the fares up to pay for the bloody things. It then means that those not in wheel chairs are paying for it.

Cgull,
In another thread we discussed the possibilities of subsidies to manufacturers for the development of these vehicles. We need more than the two we have at the moment.
Perhaps then we could get the VAT removed (because they ARE purpose built),fuel rebates,start up grants,possible tax exemptions and many more to smooth the way to a one tier system that surely is on the way.
Or perhaps I am living in cloud cuckoo land.
Ged

When we only really need between 3% and 8% of taxis/PH to be WAVs in the first place, to enforce that they all are is simply insanity in economic terms. (So the Government may go for that).

But Ged, you are surely in cloud cuckoo land if you think that the sensible, logical, and extremely workable suggestions you make will ever be taken up by Government. They just don't DO that.

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