An 82 year old lady who likes to try and stay active takes her usual twice weekly walk into the town centre, have lunch with some friends and buy a few essentials. She can manage the walk down, but not the walk back, and as the bus doesn’t run anywhere near her home, she heads for the taxi rank to take her usual taxi trip home. There aren’t any taxis at the rank, so she stands there patiently waiting for one to return, but no taxis are in sight. She needs to get home on time for her medication and she does not own a mobile phone, so after 20 minutes or so, she reluctantly starts to walk, hoping that she may still see a taxi and hail it down, but to no avail, and continues to walk as the arthritis pain sets in. So where are all the taxis? – All the hackney carriages have driven over to Truro and Falmouth to work, because there is a lot more money to be made over there!!
So how do we stop such a situation from becoming reality? Simple, we continue to maintain the current boundaries which restrict the operating area of a hackney carriage to the zone it is licensed for, which guarantees supply of service in the area it is assigned to – hence the 6 taxi zones! In other words – no change needed.
People have stated that we need to ‘harmonise’ the taxi trade once and for all!
Well the taxi and private hire trade in Cornwall is already harmonised!
All vehicles whether taxis or private hire are subject to the same harmonised vehicle specifications, tests and regulations, and likewise with the drivers.
The only difference with taxis (hackney carriages) is that they have to work in the zone they are designated to, this guarantees the supply of taxi services within that given area, and ensures those taxis cannot just ABANDON their area and customers in the quest of much more profitable locations such as Truro or Falmouth. In short, if you remove the zone boundaries, you will see a mass migration of taxis from the 5 poorer zones to the more affluent areas being Truro and Falmouth, resulting in the zone they should be working in abandoned with passengers waiting by the road side with no hope of getting a taxi.
This will overwhelmingly increase competition in Truro and Falmouth, cause taxi parking chaos at the taxi ranks, potential ‘taxi wars’, run prices and standards down through the floor making it a nonviable business, kill jobs and basically destabilise the local taxi industry; because the council are then forced to issue more and more hackney carriage licences to service the abandoned areas, provide bigger and larger taxi ranks to accommodate all the extra taxis, putting more and more vehicles on the road to add to pollution and worsening the air quality issue, only to find that those operators then also head for Truro and Falmouth as well – money talks – that is how business works, but with no controls & restrictions in place, the only result can be ‘out of control chaos’.
The 6 Taxi Zones, combined with the numerical limits, offer the perfect solution to ensuring a well balanced and guaranteed infrastructure of small on demand transport services for it’s public in the form of taxis, and with the use of unmet demand surveys (which the trade pay for) ensure there is the correct level of supply, and the current system works perfectly doing just that, providing a well balanced and totally ‘harmonised’ regulatory policy for an effective Hackney Carriage infrastructure, with the private hire trade to plug the gaps in Cornwall – and it works – brilliantly!
Keeping the 6 Taxi Zones = a stable on demand (small vehicle) public transport infrastructure through continuing the current well balanced, well maintained and guaranteed supply of hackney carriage services in each designated area to serve it’s public well and on demand.
De-Zoning = an unstable and unpredictable infrastructure through mass migration of hackney carriages to more affluent areas, uncontrollable increases in numbers of hackney carriage vehicles on the ranks, mounting financial pressure on all operators, resulting in the loss of jobs, driving vehicle standards and working conditions down and down, increasing pollution and poorer air quality due to much older vehicles, and an industry on self destruct.
Change for change sake? – Yep!
Sometimes things cannot be improved, as the best solution is already there!
Numerical Limit – Unmet Demand Survey here