Welsh councils support single-tier taxi system

Councils are backing the Welsh Government’s proposal to create a single-tier licensing system for taxis and private hire vehicles.
This would introduce taxi holding areas, with electric charging facilities, outside town centres to address overcrowding at taxi ranks and reflect the growing use of electronic systems to book rides.

Infrastructure secretary Ken Skates said the distinction between taxis and PHVs was “unhelpful”, with technology having made pre-booking a vehicle almost instantaneous.

LTT has obtained consultation responses from various urban and rural councils, including Cardiff, Swansea, Vale of Glamorgan and Pembrokeshire. The responses use a common template which says that new primary legislation provides an opportunity to replace the “existing archaic legislative structure” with a system reflecting “an evolving transport regime”.

“In principle, a one-tier system would be the preferred model. However, it is acknowledged that a number of challenges would have to be overcome for this model to be successfully implemented,” said the councils.

One solution to the issue of increased pressure on rank space would be provision of additional holding areas on the fringes of town centres for vehicles to wait until they are booked electronically.

“These areas could be tailored specifically for taxis, including charging points for the eventual move to electric vehicles and could be the catalyst for taxis [operators] to embrace electric vehicles.”

The response says that a single-tier system would create a level playing field for the trade, simplify insurance policies, decriminalise plying for trade with PHVs, be “much easier for the public to understand” and ensure consistent fares and quality standards. It would also “do away with the terms hackney carriage and private hire” and use only the term taxi, “which the public already recognise”.

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UBERK to charge to run over

Uber is hitting passengers with some new fees, created to entice drivers who don’t want to wait for slow passengers, drive longer distances for out-of-the-way pickups or deal with last-minute trip cancellations.

Drivers will now earn standard time and distance rates on the way to a long pickup, in addition to the standard fare. “So if it’s a 40-minute pickup, which hopefully never happens and is extremely rare, it would be some segment of 40 minutes,” Aaron Schildkrout, head of driver product at Uber, told The Verge.

Although the amount of the extra charges will depend on the market and the length of the pickup, typically drivers will start to earn standard time and distance rates after eight or 11 minutes of driving to pick up the rider, depending on the city.

Of course, riders are sure to be unhappy about the extra fees, but Schildkrout said it will solve a problem for them as well. “It’s not always as easy to get a car in the suburbs as it is in the city,” he said. “Even in the outskirts of a city, people sometimes have this experience. So, from a driver’s perspective, it’s easy to see why this makes sense: You’re more likely to forgo trips with long ETAs … With this change, we hope to make those long trips more worth drivers’ while.

And for riders, we hope this means they’ll able to get a ride reliably wherever they are.”

In addition, Uber is updating its cancellation policy so that the fee relates to time and distance. “We’ve updated our technology to actually detect progress by the driver toward the rider, so we can be more nuanced about when to charge a rider a cancellation fee,” Schildkrout said.

Riders will also be charged for making drivers wait longer than two minutes, in an extension of a pilot that started last year in New York City, New Jersey, Phoenix and Dallas. Those fees will also vary, but a wait time of three minutes and 45 seconds would cost a passenger $0.86 in added fees.

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