A PROPOSAL for a scheme that would allow passengers to share taxis during peak traffic in Dublin has received the backing of the Green Party.
The taxi-sharing scheme has been proposed by Dublin taxi driver John Timmons who is seeking public reaction to the idea before taking it any further.
He has proposed that the scheme would run for three hours every morning and evening in the greater Dublin area. Participating taxis would carry a reflective sun visor across their windscreen to indicate their involvement.
Passengers who wished to share a taxi would flag them down on the main routes going into the city and pay fixed prices of, say, €7 or €5, depending on the journey length.
Mr Timmons said it would be a win-win situation for everyone as passengers would be paying lower fares and taxi drivers would get new customers who would not normally consider taking a taxi to work. “If 5,000 taxis do it for three hours, that would take about 50,000 people. 30,000 of them could be people who would normally drive.”
Many people are heading towards the city centre in the morning, but the scheme would be more difficult to operate in the evenings, with passengers heading in all directions. Mr Timmons said the scheme was still feasible if taxis followed the bus routes out of the city.
Dublin Bus and CIÉ would be naive to object, he said, as the scheme would remove cars from the streets and make life easier for bus drivers.
Green Party transport spokesman Ciarán Cuffe said the party would favour the scheme as long as issues such as fares and passenger safety were dealt with.
“I think it’s a great idea,” he said, particularly as there were so many more taxis competing for work since deregulation.
However, the National Taxi Drivers’ Union was less enthusiastic about the plan. Its president, Tommy Gorman, said that if he told his members that they should carry several fares on one journey “I’d have to leave for Japan”.
He predicted difficulties in fare-charging and in picking up passengers at bus stops and said “it’s just not viable”.
Taxi drivers and Dublin City Council operated a taxi-sharing scheme at selected ranks over a number of Christmases in the late 1990s, before deregulation. Mr Gorman said that worked well because Dublin had fewer taxis then. “We’ve gone from 3,900 to 21,000 in the space of seven years.Dublin had 2,722 taxis in November 2000 and today we have 14,000. There’s not enough work to go around.”
There are many taxi-sharing schemes in countries such as Britain.
A fixed fare taxi-sharing scheme operates from Paddington station to central London, while taxi-sharing schemes operate to service events such as Wimbledon and Buckingham Palace’s garden parties.
A spokesman for the Commission for Taxi Regulation said the commission welcomed initiatives that promote the use of taxis “on the condition that they are within the regulations set out by the Commission”.
People interested in the idea can email Mr Timmons at taxiireland@hotmail.com
