First steps

Hello and welcome to to the first page of my blog.
At present here in Dublin its raining and the Ryder cup is on. Its quite a circus for traffic.
Taxis have been on one day strike for a couple of months now,so here is a brief overview of what its all about.
Around 5 years ago the number of taxis in the city was limited to 3030 or thereabouts.If you wanted to become a driver you had 4 choices.
1 You bought an existing taxi for 80,000 pounds the price of a house at the time.
2 You rented a taxi for 300 pounds per week plus insurance and petrol,day shift or nights.
3You hoped to be luckey when the draw would be held for new licences would be held.
4 You could also buy a hackney plate and work through a radio company.With a hack plate you could not work from a rank or pick up on the street. This did not stop many of the drivers doing it all the time.

One guy brought a case to the government saying that the corperation could not have a manopoly for the taxi licences, he took the case to Europe and won. The Gov. were told that they could not limit the numbers as thay had been doing.
Now if there had been discusssion among the people involved, then perhaps future entrants to the business would have had to pay a bond to be invested on their behalf or something like that. But with the collapse of taxi licence prices many drivers many drivers pensions dissappeared overnight.
Remember taxi plates were costing 80,000 pounds.
The Gov set the price of new licences at 7,000Pounds.
The number of taxis in Dublin had risen to allmost 13,000 Thats more than New York.
Everyone who had a spare day or two in the week bought a taxi, retired, redundant..Even Solisators bought taxi plates so that they could sail into work using the bus lanes..Michael OLeary head of Ryanair is a classic example. Yes he owns his own taxi.
So it was getting hard and then allong the taxi regulator who will rule the industry with regulation..www.taxiregulator.ie
Many changes have come but the hardest one is the abolition of pickup and luggage charges at the airport. The present status is that we pay70c to enter the holding area, when we are called up we redeem the waiting time and the airport charge by charging e1.50.
The airport authorithy are now going to abolish the entry charge in place of a once off e500 while the regulator is abolishing the luggage and pick up charges.
He has introduced other things, good and bad but none of these changes which he introduced can be appealed, he is a bit of a loose cannon, lets hope he shoots himself soon.
Now I have bored you all to death I will wish you goodnight.
John