Taxi Driver Online

A letter to Bath Chronicle from a Bath H/C driver.
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Bath Chronicle

August 8, 2006 Tuesday

HEADLINE: Coaches are squeezing out our taxis

With regards to the front page article in the Chronicle July 18 and the problems of coaches at and around the coach park, at Avon/Corn Street.

As a licensed taxi operator in the city, along with my colleagues who work from the Orange Grove/Abbey taxi rank, we have to put up with coaches picking up and setting down, most days of the week. At times we have as many as ten coaches around Orange Grove, most with their engines running to keep the air conditioning on, so that the coach interiors are cool and welcoming to the passengers, but pumping out fumes and harming the atmosphere. When they have been on our rank, we have asked them to move and the usual answer is no, not until they have loaded/unloaded the passengers. Coach drivers have driven into the sides of several taxis, just to try and get on to the rank, damaging the taxi and putting the operator off the road, while repairs are carried out. Many coaches have reversed into the small iron posts that are around the pavement, causing the council extra work, to repair/replace them. How the shops around Orange Grove manage with coaches parked outside their windows, I can't imagine.

A few years ago, we asked the council to extend the rank from the existing seven taxis permitted to wait there. This was never addressed, until one day, the council workmen arrived to paint lines on the road. We believed that our rank was to be extended. How wrong we were. The lines were to be a coach stand, just six inches behind our rank. Then, on the other side of the road, outside the Guildhall, another coach bay was installed, this time for left hand-drive coaches, so their passengers could step on to the pavement, not out into the road.

What on earth is Avon Street coach park for, if not the setting down and picking up of passengers? Then last year, the council issued 20 more licences for taxis, which means that we have even fewer spaces to 'ply for hire'.

Many times at Orange Grove, coaches arrive only to find the bays are full, so they park on the taxi rank. In law, it is an offence for any vehicle, other than a licensed hackney carriage, to park on a rank. Like Ann Garner, from the Mission Theatre, we have found that the parking attendants generally turn a blind eye to coaches.

Even local coach firms obstruct our rank if they have to set down around Orange Grove. I suppose that 50 passengers coming into the city will spend more money than the rent that the Mission pays the council, or the licence fees that taxis pay. This makes coaches much more of a money machine than us.

My message to the council would be, look after your own (ie the residents of this city) or, when tourists arrive to spend their money in this wonderful heritage city, they will have nothing to spend it on and will, therefore, stop coming.

At least the streets would be clear of coaches.

C J VEAL

Hackey Carriage operator 58/94

Monkton Farleigh
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Why doesn't the chap just get together with a few mates and apply to have the ranks enlarged. Letters to the press don't move the situation on one jot.

But the cynic in me seems to think the trade have had their minds on only one issue over the last few years.

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IDFIMH