Toronto Mayoralty candidate Olivia Chow is scheduled to visit the Taxi corral at Billy Bishop Airport on Monday, May 29th. Chow is expected to arrive around 12:30pm, to meet drivers and hear their concerns, according to an email received by
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Probably no one, not even his biggest fans, would put him in the same class of writers as Ernest Hemingway. However, as a Bullshit Detective, Hans Wienhold is in a class of his own. (In fact, in his Taxi News bio he proudly describes himself as a “Welfare Recipient at Senior’s Welfare; Self-Employed; and also, a Climate Scientist at BS Detective Services.”)
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At its May 17th “Go-Get Family Style” launch event, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi stressed the company’s safety features which include dialling 911 in case of emergency (although, Uber’s Terms explain “In the event that you need to place a 911 emergency call on behalf of your teen, the dispatcher you’re connected with will see your location, not your teen’s.” How would that help?)
As a parent and a consumer, the sheer number of sexual assaults by Uber drivers in Canada and around the globe set alarm bells ringing.
As the publisher of Taxi News, I cringe recalling comments from an Uber driver who laughed that he didn’t drive for the money: “It’s to meet chicks, man, the chicks you meet at closing time!”
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I dragged myself to the Committee meeting room and took my seat in the row of speakers. Everyone was there for the same reason: to ask for funds for their program from the limited Tourism budget. My group, Taxis on Patrol, was asking for $7,000 to help fund an annual program which presented awards to cab drivers that had helped improve safety on Toronto streets. It also had a strong impact on improving the often-tenuous relationships between the cab industry, the city, and police.
My favourite Taxis on Patrol (“TOPS”) story was of a driver who saw a woman being beaten by a man on the street. He swerved to the curb and threw open his front door: the woman jumped in, he auto-locked the doors and just kept driving.
In our most famous file, a driver had a mother in the back seat whose fevered baby had gone into convulsions. The driver contacted dispatch who contacted 911 who walked the driver through every step to restore the baby to consciousness – we actually got permission to release the dramatic 911 tape of that event, and when it was played for Metro Council, several of the councillors were crying at the end of it. The baby lived.
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Updated May 25th with estimated date of Net Zero VFH staff report ***** The staff report outlining Toronto’s vehicle-for-hire industry transition to net-zero emissions by 2030 is now expected at the July 6th meeting of the Economic and Community Development Committee
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Uber’s announcement that riders can now summon a car by making a voice call from a telephone confirms that it was a Taxi company all along, industry members say. “They have been a Taxi company all the way along, from
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The city had opened a Pandora’s Box when it initiated the restricted entry, equity licensing regime. By the time I entered the business, the city was trying to find a way of extricating itself from this system.
The main problem with extrication was that too many industry participants had invested their lives in the system the city had created. Thus, any move to eliminate the equity plate system was met with strong opposition from those who stood to lose everything they had worked for.
The city opted for a stealth approach.
The City of Ottawa has filed its closing statement in the case of Metro Taxi vs City of Ottawa.
The Executive Summary of the statement is published below; the the entire 421 page statement is available as a .pdf document at the bottom of this article.
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Giorgio Mammoliti promised that if elected Toronto’s mayor, he will end open entry for Vehicles for Hire and make his first phone call to Doug Ford and tell him to “fix Taxi insurance.”
Mammoliti was speaking at an event organized for members of the Taxi industry in a North York banquet hall on May 15th.