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TfL Consultation Fun Uber might have won a court case, but Transport for London are still threatening to regulate all sorts of silly things. But you can have your say, by copying and pasting the link below and filling in the survey which is full of free-form text boxes. I am deliberately not linking directly to it as I do not want them to be tempted to analyse where their traffic is coming from.
consultations.tfl.gov.uk/tph/private-hire-proposals/consultation
Along the way you get to be entertained by the barmy, Soviet-style ideas they have for meddling in the intricacies of other people’s affairs, and the absurd justifications thereof. My answers made much of customer choice, the regulator’s inability to predict individuals’ needs and how some of the proposals would discriminate against minorities. I feel better now.
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Well, I sent them a large hate-mail, no doubt to be promptly binned. I drove a cab in Canada for 3 years and still hate the bastard regulators.
Bloody Hell there is a lot of it! I recently did a 1-day first aid course. The forms about nothing to the porpoise were staggering. Quite what my ethnicity has to do with it is beyond me.
Thanks for this. 15 minutes of unadulterated fun, skewering them. The old-think is just staggering – it’s all about bits of paper, and recordkeeping, and tracking and referencing, most of which (as I got tired of saying) have absolutely nothing to do with safety or service.
Instead of seeing Uber etc as an opportunity for less regulation, lower costs, better transport and so on, this bunch of jobsworths just look at it as the opportunity for even more regulation. Let’s see if we can’t make driving for Uber just as complex and costly as driving a black cab! That’ll make things better!
Had fun with the English-language requirement, tho’ – racist and exclusionary! That should cause an attack of the vapors at the TfL offices!
llater,
llamas
Like the monkey trying for intercourse with a bobcat, they are trying to stay on top of things.
Abolish the “Transport for London” bureaucracy.
Government administrators do bad things to justify their existence.
If they just took the pay and perks that is taken (by force) from the taxpayers (and sit about having tea and buns) things might be tolerable – but sadly the bureaucrats insist on “working” – i.e. issuing orders messing people about.
I said something similar.
Still, feels like 10 minutes of my life I’ll never get back.
Yeah, in my internal struggle between my desire for mischief and my laziness, it seems sloth has won again. Nice that this didn’t happen to everyone, though.
Well, I’ve just filled it in, and what a tedious exercise that was. I remained polite, but argued strongly for removal of regulations and the use of market mechanisms, and of course the abolition of Transport for London. But that questionnaire is a nasty piece of work, isn’t it? Almost as bad as one about the BBC I filled in recently, which assumed that unless the BBC was “saved” some monster called Murdoch would take over my brain.
Thanks for the link. I just spent the last 20 minutes in disbelief at the sheer stupidity of the proposals clearly designed to attack a particular type of operator. What idiot would want to create artificial delays to a service or hide the level of availability? You can see the level of intelligence behind the questions, for example ‘a landline requirement’! UK banks spent the last decade moving the customers services to fixed call centers – didn’t do much for the quality or service or hold times.
Every overreach or invasive / obstructive requirement justified by ‘safety’ and a nice little final attempt to get consensus to charge more for registration and licenses (guess who pays in the end). I think they made it intentionally bloated in the hope that people would give up. I’m surprised they didn’t put in voting intentions for their Christmas Party venue.
Humbug, rant over.