Wednesday 14 January 2009

Can you move your taxi please

I was taking a short cut through New St. at lunchtime today when I saw a confrontation between a young lady from W.H.Smiths and a taxi driver. This is not the first I've seen, nor is it likely to be the last and the reason - as per usual - was the drivers had parked their taxis around Smiths' car park gates in a way that had completely blocked any vehicle from entering or leaving the car park while technically leaving the gates clear.

Certain 'professional' bodies like to claim that taxi drivers are statistically less likely to be involved in a traffic accident than other road users. However this fails to take into account accidents caused by taxis but not directly involving them such as the infamous 'u-turn in the middle of a busy street manoeuvre'. Nor does it take into account accidents caused by careless parking. Had the young lady from Smiths tried to manoeuvre her car out and hit one of the taxis in the process she would have been held solely responsible for it. In addition, she would become another statistic for chauvinistic vermin to hold up as further prove that women are bad drivers despite all the evidence to the contrary.

More importantly, despite double yellow lines on both sides of the street for it's entire length, local traffic wardens completely ignore this blatant disregard for the law except when they've received a specific complaint. Now we all know what traffic wardens are like so is it really that much of a stretch to imagine they might have received instructions to ignore this?

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