High time for taxi drivers to clean up their act

Published: 7 April, 2011

• I COULDN’T believe my eyes when I read the article ‘Cabbies hit out at left-turn ban’(March 24).  

The cab drivers’ spokesman, Geoffrey Reisel, had the brass neck to claim that taxis will drive 3.7 million extra miles and generate releasing 1,764 tons of carbon per year.  

Is he saying they’ll divert via Essex or wot? Taxi drivers claiming concern for global warming! That’s a new one. 

The now banned vehicle turn north into Marchmont Street will add all of 200 metres to taxi journeys to King’s Cross and St Pancras.  

It was introduced after very extensive local consultation for the safety of pedestrians and cyclists after a fatality and multiple accidents.  

Just 23,000 taxis contribute a staggering 30 per cent of central London’s pollution and it’s not just the diesel fumes but arsenic from their cheap brake pads and tyres.  

The vast majority of them are nowhere near the contemporary cleaner Euro 4 European standard and mayor Boris Johnson recently backed down from proposing to outlaw taxis over 10 years old – meaning tens of thousands are still belching out poisonous fumes because their retro-fit particulate filters don’t work satisfactorily.

It’s time to stand up to these taxi-driver bullies who are the single biggest contributors to poisoning our city.  

With help from the mayor and Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, they should clean up their act before any of their bleating deserves sympathy.

CLLR PAUL BRAITHWAITE
Lib Dem, Cantelowes ward

MILES OUT!

• THE maths being used by Radio Taxis Group (RTG) to attack the left-turn ban in Bloomsbury as damaging to the environment are fishy. 

According to RTG’s information, the forced detour for taxi drivers will add an extra 3.67 million taxi miles a year. I arrived at a more sensible 276,000 miles. If one overestimates the detour distance by a factor of nearly two (it’s more like 0.177, not 0.333 miles) and assumes that every single one of the 22,000 licensed cab drivers (1996 figure) will pass through that specific intersection twice every day, one is bound to come up with a silly figure.

The carbon calculation is a red herring (or is it a green herring?). 

Was it created to divert attention away from the anger on display as taxi drivers flout the ban on a daily basis? Ten metres of extra curbing has been added to counter this and still taxis and other cars can be seen driving defiantly around it. 

A new kind of accident waiting to happen at this troubled intersection?

I’m amazed by the sense of entitlement some road users seem to have, to see the neighbourhood as a highway that they must have a unfettered run through, or even as a car park for Oxford Street shopping. 

The needs of the many pedestrians in the area – local residents and tourists alike – should always come first.

CLARE HILL, WC1