There has been a lot of discussion about the number of buses on Edinburgh’s Princes Street, and the idea of removing some or all of them as part of moves to reduce traffic in the city centre. (See here for my thoughts on the subject). However, I’ve seen very little discussion about taxis. When private traffic on Princes Street was first restricted 20 odd years ago, most council officials wanted taxis banned entirely but after lobbying by the taxi trade, this idea was dropped. It would be timely to revisit the matter. 

​Thousands of taxis use Princes Street each day - my surveys suggested that they could form more more than a quarter of all vehicles on the street. But many taxis carry no passengers at all. I carried out a count of how many passengers occupied 50 taxis in the block between Frederick and Hanover Streets in half an hour on the morning of 2 April. Just over half the taxis passing had no passengers, with the driver either plying for hire, or off duty.  Only 9 (18%) carried more than one passenger. The average occupancy of all taxis was 0.7 people (excluding the driver, obviously). More detailed surveys of different parts of the street and at different times are needed to establish better data, but these results raise important questions. Is this an efficient way to move people in the city centre? Is this the best use of the premium space that is Princes Street? Removing taxis would reduce congestion and pollution, speed up buses and make cycling safer.​

Motability has been criticised again by the House of Commons Work and Pensions and Treasury Committees at evidence taken on 9 January. This follows publication of the recent report by the National Audit Office (NAO) which broadly endorsed the criticisms of executive pay, reserves and governance. Senior figures in both the Motability Charity and its commercial arm Motability Operations say they accept all the NAO recommendations - while appearing at the same time to justify all their actions. Some words used by MPs included “evasiveness”, “lack of transparency”, “defensiveness”. NAO’s head, Sir Amyas Morse, concluded his evidence by saying “there does need to be change”. 

Three observations: Firstly, risk management is fundamental to the business, and Motability Operations makes much of its “dynamic and robust approach” to managing risks (lots more like this screenshot in the Annual Report). So how didn't it spot the very obvious reputational and political risks currently resulting from its remuneration and reserves policies? They were surely not hard to foresee…

Local service buses again formed less than half of all traffic in Princes Street, with other significant vehicles including tourist buses and especially taxis. Many of these vehicles don’t stop at all on Princes Street, using it simply as a short cut thoroughfare. If reducing traffic on Princes Street is a key aim (as it appears to be as part of the ‘City Centre Transformation initiative’), wouldn't it make sense to look at removing such traffic first?​

Another thought on street clutter...although widely recognised as a significant problem for pedestrians (both because it reduces the available space for walking and because it can represent a serious hazard for some people, most obviously those with visual impairments) what is less widely acknowledged is the apparent effect that street clutter has on attracting other clutter.

The Chartered Institution of Highways and Transportation (CIHT) has announced its programme of annual awards for 2018. Unfortunately there is no category this year for ‘reducing street clutter’ as in 2017. This award was a very welcome initiative in view of the publication of the new Traffic Signs Regulations and General Directions (TSRGD, or ‘Traffic Signs Regs’) in 2016. 

To those unfamiliar with this less-than exciting sounding document, this is the statutory guidance which governs when and where road signs are required. The guidance states ” the number of traffic signs has doubled in the past 20 years. This is unsustainable, and bears out the need to reduce signing wherever possible. A culture change is needed in the way signing is used” (2.9).​

During his recent work in Edinburgh (1) the influential Danish urban designer Jan Gehl reportedly described Princes Street as a “big bus station”. Certainly, the pedestrian environment is dominated by traffic, which can also obscure the famous views to the Old Town and Castle. There now seem to be growing whispers of a radical change to Edinburgh’s transport system; to shift buses off Princes Street.  
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The Council is currently consulting on hugely unpopular proposals for a triangular gyratory system on Picardy Place (2) on the north-east edge of the UNESCO World Heritage site. Officials have recently claimed that one benefit of the scheme is that it would enable buses from the north side of Edinburgh to terminate there and turn around. Passengers for Princes Street and beyond would then be expected to change onto an expanded tram network, so removing hundreds of buses a day from Princes Street. This is not something that should be considered lightly.

People on lower incomes are much more likely to walk to work thank those on higher incomes, who are much more likely to drive. While this may be an intuitive and obvious statement, the difference in the travel-to-work patterns of poorer and wealthier people in Scotland is starkly evident from statistics published by Transport Scotland earlier this year. * The chart below shows the correlation between income and driving; and also the inverse correlation between income and walking. This demonstrates, not for the first time, the importance of investing in walking not only on environmental and health grounds, but also to promote social equality.
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Lothian Taxicard, offering discounted taxi fares to disabled people, was started 25 years ago. As the council officer who was principally responsible for developing the scheme, I thought it a timely point to reflect on its history - and the possible future of such schemes.​

The introduction of a Taxicard scheme was not my idea; my then boss Keith Gowenlock proposed the service as part of ‘the multi-modal approach’ to accessible transport that Lothian Regional Council (LRC) was developing. This was supported by the head of the Public Transport Unit David Chambers, and at a political level, by Councillors Ron Muir and then David Begg who chaired the Transport Committee. The Lothian scheme was loosely modelled on the London Taxicard scheme which the GLC had funded for some time along with dial-a-ride services. Interestingly, a taxi subsidy scheme had also run in Edinburgh for a number of years, administered by the rather unfortunately-named Edinburgh Cripple Aid Society (which has since re-branded solely as ‘ECAS’). The ECAS scheme issued “chits’ giving discounted fares to a group of disabled people for use with a contracted local taxi firm, Radiocabs.

However, the ECAS scheme was not sustainable; for a start, it applied only to a small group of people in Edinburgh, and the Regional Council, which had taken over funding of the scheme, needed to ensure that services were available more fairly, including in the other districts in the Region (West, East and Midlothian).  ECAS was keen for the Council to take over administration of the scheme. For its part, LRC saw a Taxicard scheme offering several distinctive benefits which other services could not. In particular, although LRC funded the local dial-a-ride service Handicabs, and since 1990 a semi-scheduled Dial-a-Bus shopping service, these door to door schemes did not suit everyone. Getting through on the phone to secure a booking was a problem and not everyone wanted to (or could) plan their trips in advance. In addition, as a service specifically for disabled people, dial-a-rides were seen by some as having a degree of stigma as a ‘special’ or segregated service, and they provided limited choice to the passenger. Of course, mainstream public transport was a complete no-go area for most disabled people at this time as buses typically had three steps up to a high floor. Taxicard therefore complemented other door to door services and efforts to improve the accessibility of mainstream public transport.​

Edinburgh District Council had also been the first council outside London to stipulate that all taxis must become wheelchair accessible. Along with this requirement, Edinburgh led the way in training taxi drivers on how to assist passengers using wheelchairs, with mandatory sessions for drivers overseen by the Cab Office, then managed by the police. Unquestionably, not all taxi drivers welcomed these new obligations, but a Taxicard scheme could complement these regulatory measures by encouraging disabled people to use taxis, stimulating customer demand.

So the Lothian Taxicard scheme was launched in 1992, offering a maximum of 104 single trips a year (this maximum limit echoed the demands of the ‘One Trip a Week’ campaign for dial-a-ride funding which I had led in London a few years earlier). The chief criterion for eligibility for a Taxicard was that the applicant was unable to use buses. Local taxi and private hire companies were invited to participate in the scheme, so that there was usually both a choice of service provider, and of vehicles type. The user had to make a minimum payment of £1.00 and would pay no more until the fare exceeded £5.00; anything above that was payable by the passenger. In 1992, this subsidy of up to £4 per trip paid for a reasonable distance. Triplicate receipt pads were issued to participating companies, with passenger, council and taxi firm each getting a copy. The scheme was launched in West Lothian and then rolled out to the other councils with (from memory) an annual budget of £0.5 million. It is hard not to feel a little nostalgic for a time when a local authority had both the money and the political will to initiate new services like this!

Unsurprisingly, the scheme was immediately popular, with rapidly-developing demand for Taxicards and immensely positive feedback. The number of trips by Taxicard quickly outstripped those by dial-a-ride and Dial-a-Bus, and with a financial ceiling per trip, it represented a cost-effective way of significantly increasing travel options for many disabled people to the council. A Taxicard Users’ Association developed, which became influential as a disability-led group campaigning for accessible transport. The scheme was part of the reason that Lothian Regional Council won the first Equality Award by the European Commission in Scotland in 1995, and several other regional councils introduced similar schemes. However, controlling budgets was always a problem and it was administratively cumbersome, with thousands of trip slips processed monthly to control the 104 limit and to check taxi invoices. Eligibility was largely controlled through requiring that Taxicard applicants did not also hold concessionary travel (bus) permits but eligibility was always prone to ‘grey areas’ given that people do not neatly fall into two boxes - those who can, and those who can’t ‘use conventional buses’. As buses have become more accessible and concepts of disability (including mental health) have changed, eligibility has no doubt become more contested.

The scheme survived local government re-organisation in 1996, with each of the four successor unitary councils in the Lothians maintaining their own Taxicard schemes. However, over the years, the benefits provided have been eroded as senior officials gave the scheme less priority and reduced budgets. The minimum flat rate contribution by the passenger was raised to £2.00 and over time, the remaining £3.00 subsidy went less and less far - literally - due to taxi fare inflation. Perhaps I’m reading more into this than I should, but I’m struck how the scheme logo in Edinburgh today is completely unchanged from 1992! While the scheme continues in the local authorities today, Midlothian closed the scheme to new entrants in 2015.