On 05/10/2015 16:07, Recliner wrote:
JNugent wrote:
On 05/10/2015 14:10, Someone Somewhere wrote:
On 10/5/2015 1:17 PM, JNugent wrote:
On 05/10/2015 09:18, Someone Somewhere wrote:
On 10/4/2015 2:10 PM, JNugent wrote:
On 03/10/2015 09:07, Someone Somewhere wrote:
Seriously?

Because a taxi is - in its very essence - a *private* space which
can be
hired by the passenger to the exclusion of others. It is not a bus.
If a
bus is what is wanted, buses are available.


What? There's a bus that takes me from Heathrow to outside my
house in
Shadwell?

Provided you're willing to change a few times, yes.


More times than the TfL planner can cope with to get outside my house.

That's a problem you have with buses. Not everyone has it.

Given the shortest possible bus route from Heathrow is over 3 hours, and
that includes a 25 minute walk at the end of it (which would be fun with
luggage) and 4 separate buses makes it utterly impractical when most
other forms of transport are roughly an hour. It's also hardly like I
live somewhere obscure or hard to reach. It seems impossible to get the
journey planner to actually generate a journey that ends at my local bus
stop.

Clearly, with a service bus time of about three hours to LHR, you are
somewhere in the broadly London area. But why leave it at just arguing
about journey times to Heathrow? Why don't you check out the bus journey
times to Ringway or Leeds-Bradford, or maybe to Prestwick?

The fact that your particular journey is awkward or time-consuming is a
matter for you, not for others.

But you would seek to block someone who offers to solve the problem
efficiently.


The fact that you do is not a good reason for disrupting the
legitimate livelihood of others.

When you say "the legitimate livelihood" you mean the level of
protectionism built in by law to prevent people making a choice of
whether to share a vehicle or hire one entirely to themselves where
sharing is better for the passengers pocket, the environment and other
road users?

How many times do I have to tell you this before it sinks in?

You DO have the right to share a taxi, or a pirate car, if that's what
you want to do.

Sure, but YOU would block the use of technology to facilitate this.

Not at all. I can see that there might be a market for a phone app that
"marries up" people in a particular small area who want to go the same
way in a shared taxi. It's exactly the sort pf thing that apps could do
easily.

And what's wrong with that, other than that it might be risky?

Nothing - as long as the passengers are doing the choosing.

What I'm against is the driver or operator doing the selecting.

I have to say that I have in fact shared a taxi, with strangers, from at
least 3 major London airports.

So it works. And that's under the law as it is today (where apparently,
a "level of protectionism built in by law to prevent people making a
choice of whether to share a vehicle or hire one entirely to themselves
where sharing is better for the passengers pocket, the environment and
other road users").

So what's the complaint?

That it has to be done by the customer, when a supplier could do it more
efficiently.

Maybe.

Or more dangerously.