I climb into the driving seat of a taxi to respond to a call.
I pick up my passengers; it’s a school run. Halfway to school the phone rings again. I have an earpiece so I answer it. It’s another job, so I grab the radio and send another driver.
We’re nearly at the school now. The roads are busy. I’m concentrating, but the phone rings again. This time it’s a booking for later today, and I can’t write it down at the moment so I try to keep it in my head.
While I’m trying to make a mental note of those details, I can see another call waiting in the background. I hang up and that call comes through. Someone wants a quote for an airport run, and since I can’t write their number down and get back to them, I try to recall the price from memory as best I can.
All these phone calls are distracting me from the road, and I almost don’t notice the little girl who appears from between two parked cars on a bicycle. I miss her by an inch, and I just hope nothing else comes in on the phone in the middle of the three-point turn I have to do to get away once I’ve dropped these people off.
Does that sound safe?
Sadly, those are the kinds of working conditions that many taxi drivers in smaller towns in the UK are expected to put up with. Operators either can’t afford or simply don’t want to pay to have a call handler in the office, so drivers are being lumbered with doing it all themselves while negotiating the traffic too.
I spent six years working for a small cab firm and I finished in no small part because I’d had enough near misses through juggling phone calls with the steering wheel – and the last thing I wanted was someone’s death on my conscience should the worst happen.
The problem is, this has become so accepted as a way of doing business that everyone seems to shut up and put up with it.
But it’s dangerous. It’s not fair on the passengers, it’s not fair on the taxi drivers and it’s not fair on pedestrians and other road users. Even using a hands-free kit doesn’t keep drivers from being distracted as they think not only about what they’re doing now but the next two or three jobs in the queue as well.
It has to stop, but it won’t so long as taxi firms are allowed to get away with it.
That’s why I’ve created an e-petition asking the Government to look into banning taxi firms from operating in this way.
I may be out of the trade now, but I still feel passionately that this is an issue in dire need of addressing. So I would like to ask all readers to consider supporting me and signing my petition. You never know, it could help save someone’s life one day.
* Jim Hardaker is a Lib Dem supporter in Skegness
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7 Comments
Jim – thanks for the article. I know little about what’s involved with being a cabbie, but I’m concerned about an outright ban here.
Firstly (assuming it’s a hands-free phone) we’d be saying that a taxi driver couldn’t take calls when any other driver could. What makes them less safe? Any other driver could be carrying passengers.
Secondly wouldn’t this just put independents out of business? It’s the larger companies where they’ll have operators and fleet co-ordinators, and we’d surely just end up with more of these and make it impossible to run a small firm. Is there any way that a co-ordinator could act for various small firms, each paying a proportion (and with separate phone numbers, so no bleeding of trade across them?)
Finally, would you ban them from receiving personal calls while driving? Sounds near impossible to enforce if so, and no less a distraction if not.
Are there any alternatives to a simple ban you could suggest? Seems to me you’ve raised an important issue but I wonder if it needs some more thought about the best measures to take.
Good article, Jim. I would be interested in hearing the solutions – presumably technology – that can be employed to reduce the risks you highlight.
It’s well known that responding to phone calls, hands free or not, reduces driver capability to well below what it would be when slightly over the drinking limit. No-one should be using a phone when driving. No-one. If you need to take a phone call, stop, turn the engine off. and then take it.
The technological solution is driverless vehicles. Coming soon, probably within 10 years. Shorter term, something that interferes with mobile signals in cars. Something like 9 points on the licence for using a mobile, whether hands free or not, when driving.
In a car, you’re in charge of 2 tonnes that’s capable of 100mph or more. It’s your responsibility to be in control of it, not distracted. It’s not the driver’s right to maim or kill people that get in the way.
Thank you for the comments.
You raise valid points, tpfkar. To answer the first one, the reason I’m so concerned about taxi drivers is because of the volume of calls they take. A regular motorist may have one or two basic conversations on the phone with colleagues, friends and so on, but some taxi drivers are answering dozens of calls in a day not only for him/herself but also to dish out to other drivers in the fleet. They not only have the distraction of phone call after phone call but also that of attempting to remember multiple jobs and the locations of several taxis all in their heads, all while driving. It is specifically the use of drivers doubling up as operators that I object to.
You’re also right to suggest that there would be an economic impact, and any ban would need to be tailored to recognise that a ‘one-man band’ driver with only a modest supply of work is less of a risk than a driver who’s also co-ordinating half a dozen other vehicles too. In general, at least in my small corner of the world, independent drivers tend to come and go fairly quickly as well, and so an owner-driver who’s around at the start of the legislative process will most likely have either a) packed up shop anyway, or b) expanded their business sufficiently to cope with it, by the time any law was passed.
As for alternatives, and to answer Joe’s question as well, I see communal call-handling centres as a possibility. These could be established as a service by the local authorities who already take plenty of money off taxi drivers and operators in licensing fees, or they could be something that the smaller firms could subscribe to for a fee that would be a lot less than each employing receptionists of their own. Calls could be routed in such a way that the operator/s can see to which firm each job belongs, and allocate them with the use of a dispatch system like those made by Autocab and others.
Personally, I always felt that taxis should be more centrally controlled. That would not only enable the above to be addressed but improve the service to the customer and reduce fuel consumption too – a setup not a million miles from that in London, where as I understand it there are much larger firms but fewer of them. But I think that would be a little too radical for many to accept. Communal call-handling centres may be a happy (or at least more workable) medium.
As Jenny says, it is a known fact that using a phone at the wheel is a distraction. I always felt uncomfortable doing it as a taxi driver, and to be quite honest found it so distracting at times as to have argued that it fell into the ‘driving without due care and attention’ category anyway. After a while, and more than a few near-misses, I simply started rejecting calls that came in at a time when it might be a hazard to answer them, deciding that I would much rather hurt the firm’s takings than hurt a pedestrian because I wasn’t paying attention to the road. This of course doesn’t make a lot of economic sense, and in the end I quit the trade altogether.
Whatever happens, I hope that it can at least be addressed somewhere. Even out of the trade, it still worries me!
Even in a small firm surely it is unlikely that all the drivers will be carrying a fare at the same time. So perhaps there is a technological solution here that forwards calls to a driver who is not taking a fare at the time. They should still pull over of course.
Thanks Jim. Petition signed.
Unfortunately at least in my time on the taxis I found it quite was quite often the case that all drivers would be carrying fares at the same time. This is a particular problem at the peak hours for taxis, which can include but are certainly not limited to school run times and early evenings. You are right in that there is the technology for calls to be forwarded from one driver to another, and in essence it’s a good idea, but the trouble is you are then getting into other dodgy ground because you no longer have a controller who is aware of all the taxis’ locations and the paperwork isn’t getting kept up to date properly.
I’ve just noticed another e-petition that I found quite interesting; a call for taxis to be fitted with telematics devices: http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/55060