One of my favourite parts of popping back to Limerick is picking up a copy of the Limerick Post. I adore the way that it pairs gaudy commercial features with local arts endeavours. It makes for a heady mix. Just this past weekend, the Post ran it’s front page with a headline story claiming that full-time taxi drivers were losing business to part-timers.
The story by Lorraine Carey, points?out full-time taxi drivers are experiencing a loss in business caused by part-time moonlighters who drive out-of-hours and at weekends. What is do I say? Tough shit. It’s about time that taxi-men who have held us commuters at mercy for years, were challenged. They have had it they own way for much too long.
The story goes on to flax about how how taxi drivers are concerned on two counts - safety and finances. Raising concerns about safety is tantamount to scare-mongering. Taxi drivers contend that part-time drivers who drive after work are unsafe. All this crying over passenger safety while convicted criminals continue to hold taxi licenses. Just how safe are we from taxi drivers themselves? Sound like a classic smoke-screen of protectionism to me.
The real reason is financial. The opening of taxiing to new licensees has giving consumers extra choice. New entrants to markets means more competition. Slipped standards make for messy cabs. Discerning customers won’t jump into a cab that looks like a warzone driven by a slovenly serial killer-type, when there’s suitable cab around the next corner. And, actually on that? Are there really that many extra taxi cabs on the streets? Perhaps they are all in Limerick, because on the average Saturday night in Dublin, they are about as easy to source as black opals.
What the taxi drivers aren’t saying, is that many of these part-timers are renting the plates on the cheap from taxi drivers. The Post article makes reference to the fact that a plate can be bought for six thousand Euro. Part-time drivers can easily rent a plate for a couple of hundred Euro and start business straight away. No fuss. Forget digging for six grand, cha-ching. An industry can’t bitch about moves to liberalise their sector, while benefit too - right?
Virtually every part of the private sector has felt the pinch of competition. Look at the liberalisation of transport.? Private bus companies have jumped in and supplemented routes whose nationalised links are oversubscribed and inefficient. Disagree with? me? Try catching a bus to Cork or Limerick at a weekend or near Christmas. To find the best value services to national city hubs, I suggest you drop by your nearest third-level student union. On notice-boards next to ads seeking roommates or advocating safe sex, you’ll see the posters for private bus companies offering direct routes at reasonable prices.
You may scream that’s comparing apples to oranges, as I’m taking public bus transport as an example. That doesn’t affect people who have a financial interest in the protection of industry. You forget that each and everyone of us tax payers holds an interest in the healthy balance sheet of the Bus Eireann. I, for one, welcome the introduction of sensible competition to shake up bus services.? Taxi drivers ought to be thankful that new entrants are revitalising their industry. It needed a shake up and now it has it.
I want to see wider government initiates to stave off protectionism in our market economy. Ireland Inc has thrived on being an offshore magnet. Fuelled by a low corporate taxation regime instituted and preserved by successive governments, it has hit above it’s weight on attracting international investment. Progressive free market economics cannot only exist in our international affairs, it needs to come out of the arrivals lounge of Dublin airport and into as many sectors of the economy as is practicable. Progressive thinking brings innovative and sound economic benefits to consumers.
