MAJOR TRAFFIC disruption is expected in Dublin on Friday when a convoy of up to 3,000 taxis travel towards the city centre during morning rush hour in an ongoing protest over the number of taxis in the capital.
The Taxi Drivers for Change group objects to what it says is a lack of regulation in the sector, which has seen taxi numbers in the city rising to more than 16,000 in recent years. This will be their seventh protest in recent weeks and is expected to cause the most disruption, according to Jim Waldron, one of the group’s founders.
The group is encouraging taxi drivers to congregate at the Liffey Valley Shopping Centre, the Airside Retail Park in Swords and in the city centre at 8am.
They will then make their way to the office of the Commission for Taxi Regulation on Fitzwilliam Square, where a meeting of the commission’s advisory council will be taking place. The protest is expected to finish at 2pm. The group is asking drivers not taking part in the protest to stop working from 8am to 2pm in a gesture of solidarity.
Minister for Transport Noel Dempsey had refused to meet the group, Mr Waldron said, and last week’s Goodbody report had caused great anger among drivers.
The report rejected their demands to suspend the issuing of new licences and denied that their earnings had collapsed. Taxi drivers have claimed that fellow drivers are turning on each other because of the fierce competition for fares.
Pat Connors, who has been in the business for 25 years, said he had three unsettling incidents with fellow drivers and these incidents were becoming a daily occurrence.
There was an unspoken rule that taxi drivers did not overtake one another unless a driver was not making reasonable progress. They also avoided picking up a fare within 100 yards of a taxi rank but Mr Connors said these unspoken rules were constantly flouted.
In one incident, he claimed he was assaulted by a driver at a rank who believed he had gone ahead of him. Another time, a driver who had attempted to pass him on several occasions flicked his lit cigarette at him because he got to a fare first. On the third occasion, a driver overtook him on Wexford Street and clipped his car in a bid to pick up a passenger first.
He said taxi drivers were so desperate that they would nearly take the fare out of someone else’s car.
Another taxi driver told how a driver swung a punch at him after he stopped to pick up a fare and the other driver believed he was entitled to it. “The fare was sitting in my car watching and told me to report it but what’s the point?”
Taxi Drivers for Change said the group did not condone such behaviour but it was happening because drivers were so stressed.
