BITS AND BOBBIES
Let’s kick off with a ‘name and shame’ of yet another very selfish Met London cab driver using a Brighton taxi rank for free parking with this spanking new TXE LM22 FEK - 21245 where the driver decided to block our seafront rank for most of the day and night. Ironically, although a ticket was issued this is actually cheaper than the local parking rates. But please don’t get any ideas about this as I can tell you that the trade was looking to take further action, but being ‘fit & proper’ prevented this.
BHCTA – TRADE VIDEOS
In November we had a couple of unfortunate ‘interactions’ with two Sussex Police officers. Both incidents have been posted on our Youtube BHCTA Video Channel:
tinyurl.com/bhcta-trade-videos
The first one from November, involved a police officer accusing a cab driver of failing to stop at a red light. Despite the driver trying to show the officer the dashcam video the officer refused to accept this. There then followed quite an argument between the two. The extremely important point is that the officer had no understanding of the traffic light set-up in the place in question which is a three-way system. And whilst also a pedestrian crossing this is only red on all lights when the crossing is activated by a pedestrian. At other times the lights work independently. The officer denied the existence of these anywhere which is very odd.
The other point is that the officer was in his car some 200m away travelling in the opposite direction heading north, whilst the cab driver was stopped facing south. What the officer actually saw was a red light on his side looking north, but could not see the other side of the lights facing south which turned to green. The driver quite rightly refused to accept the ticket and was so upset with the officer’s dogmatic attitude that he stopped working and went home at 1:30am.
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However, thirty-minutes later at 2:00am the driver received a phone call from the officer apologising as he admitted he had made a mistake! He told the driver that he had cancelled the ticket which in one way is a shame because the officer was eagerly waiting “…to let the court decide on this”. Ok… so the officer made a mistake, but you need to watch the video where the driver made sure the interaction was recorded on his phone, which has had 30k views to date, to see the attitude of the officer and why the driver was so frustrated. A complaint has been lodged and also a request for the video from the officer’s body-cam. See the video here:
tinyurl.com/police05112022
OH NO… NOT ANOTHER ONE!
Another colleague also had an encounter with a Sussex Police officer who decided he had the right to use a taxi rank to park on to get a takeaway. Yes, we know that police officers have to eat, but just the same as cab drivers have the right to earn money to eat, so this should not be at the expense of a taxi driver trying to earn a living. The taxi driver had the good sense to record the incident which has been passed onto Sussex Police:
tinyurl.com/ship-rank1 You can see that the taxi driver was quite exasperated at the attitude of the officer who had actually threatened him with a ticket for parking on the yellow lines that are behind the rank where he was waiting to get on to it because the officer had blocked it! I hope you see the irony in this.
The point here is that this rank is always used for free parking of private cars which never get ticketed and unfortunately the police officer in this example has done exactly the same. Incidents like this sours the relationship between the local cab trade and the police. At a previous Trade Forum meeting a police rep told us to ask officers to move off the ranks (albeit when on an emergency) and if they do not then to make a report. So, we are just following those instructions.
To put it bluntly the trade here is peed off with the massive rise in private cars using our ranks for free parking. Watch this video of an important rank serving the main hospital in the city that is constantly used for private parking:
tinyurl.com/paston-rank101122
A representative from a company which recently undertook a three-yearly ‘Unmet Demand’ survey for the council, gave a scathing verbal report on our ranks
DECEMBER 2022 PHTM
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