On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 02:03:30PM -0000, Basil Jet wrote:

Taxis need to be hailable on red routes - without that, London would become,
in tourists' eyes, the only city in the world where the taxis would always
sail past and never pick you up. The huge number of one-way roads and banned
turns mean that a taxi pulling around a corner from a red route to pick
someone up might be putting the fare up by a fiver - it would significantly
reducing the capacity of the fleet to carry people home at busy times. Taxis
setting down on red routes is harder to justify.

Surely it can be justified on exactly the same grounds - without that,
London would become, in tourists' eyes, the only city in the world where
when you tell a taxi driver to take you to the Hotel De Posh he drops
you a hundred metres down the road for no good reason.

Since minicabs are only supposed to perform pre-booked journeys, I see
little justification for allowing them to pick up on red routes

because people want to be picked up from the Hotel De Posh, perhaps?

because
finding the right person, checking they are the right person and
reprogramming the satnav takes so much longer than someone hailing a taxi,
saying where they are going and zooming away.

Not really. Whenever I use a minicab it takes no time at all for the
driver to find me and verify that I'm the right person. *He* doesn't
have to find *me*, *I* find *him*, by looking at all the approaching
vehicles and finding the one that looks like the vehicle the dispatcher
described to me over the phone. He verifies that I'm the right guy by
asking "Mr Cantrell?", and I say "yes". As for programming the satnav -
surely he would have done that before setting off. It's true that the
satnav I had a few years ago couldn't handle trips with multiple stops,
but modern ones can. And for an awful lot of trips, they won't need to
use it anyway.

--
David Cantrell | Enforcer, South London Linguistic Massive

Compromise: n: lowering my standards so you can meet them