New Year’s Eve Information for Taxi and Private Hire Drivers
On New Year’s Eve the annual fireworks display will once again take place on the River Thames opposite the London Eye. Special arrangements will be in place for access to the ticket only viewing areas with specific entrance and egress routes. This notice contains important information for taxi and private hire drivers who are dropping off or picking up passengers with tickets to the event.
Viewing Areas
The viewing areas are only accessible to people with a ticket to a designated viewing area. There are a number of different designated viewing areas and passengers must go to the area that is specified on their ticket.
Each viewing area has a specific entrance and so it is essential that you know which viewing area your passengers have tickets for, so as you can drop them off in a convenient location.
There are five designated viewing areas and these are colour coded as are the associated tickets. The codes are:
Red – along Victoria Embankment, between Embankment Station and Temple Station
Blue – along Victoria Embankment, between Northumberland Avenue and Westminster Bridge
Green – Belvedere Road
White – Westminster Bridge
Pink – Waterloo Bridge
Check with your passengers which area their ticket is for so as you know where it is best to drop them off or pick them up.
The entrances for each area are shown on the map below. Entrances for the red and blue viewing areas are on the northern side of the river while the entrances for the green, white and pink viewing areas are on the southern side.
Entrances to Designated Viewing Areas
Pedestrian Restrictions
The map below shows the times when pedestrian restrictions will start to come into effect on 31 December. On this map you can check whether certain locations where passengers may want to be dropped off at or picked up from are located within a ticketed viewing area, an outer event area, or outside of the event area altogether.
Restriction times
Ticketed area restricted from 14:00 Ticketed area restricted from 17:00 Outer event area restricted from 20:00
Road Closures
In order to ensure that such a large event as the New Year’s Eve fireworks display can take place safely, a number of road closures are required.
The map in Appendix 1 shows the road closures that will be in place and the times these come into effect. The road closures will remain in place once the fireworks display has finished and will be removed once it is safe to do so. When picking up passengers who have made a booking it is important to
confirm which viewing area they have been in so as you can arrange to pick them up at a convenient location outside of the road closure area.
Some suggestions for pick up locations for each viewing area are below:
Red viewing area– along Victoria Embankment, between Embankment Station and Temple Station (north of the river)
• Holborn Viaduct
• Newgate Street
• Chancery Lane Tube Station/Gray’s Inn Road
Blue viewing area – along Victoria Embankment, between Northumberland Avenue and Westminster Bridge (north of the river)
• Lower Grosvenor Place • Bressenden Place
• Grosvenor Gardens
• Grosvenor Place
• Vauxhall Bridge Road • Conduit Street
Green viewing area – Belvedere Road, White viewing area – Westminster Bridge and Pink viewing area – Waterloo Bridge (south of the river)
• Kennington Road up to Lambeth Road
• St George’s Road
• Newington Causeway • Borough High Street
Taxi Ranks
Although taxi ranks in the road closure area will not be accessible there are a number of ranks outside of the area including:
Conduit Street
Hamilton Place
Park Lane
Victoria Station – Bridge Place and Vauxhall Bridge Road only
Ecclestone Place
South Lambeth Place
South Lambeth Road
New Kent Road
London Bridge Station
St Thomas Street
Charterhouse Street
Holborn (Waterhouse Court)
Gray’s Inn Road (ITN)
Further information about the New Year’s Eve fireworks display is available on
One woman’s Uber journey home turned into a nightmare when her driver allegedly took her miles out of her way, swore at her and said he hoped that she got raped. The victim, a 31-year-old finance worker, called an Uber cab at 2.08am on Sunday morning to take her home from South Kensington to Islington. Partway through her journey, she asked the driver to take her to her boyfriend’s house, also in Islington, instead – but soon realised he was taking a longer route than necessary.when she question him on this, “He started being extremely rude to me”. “He was becoming more and more aggressive as the journey continued and told me to shut the f*** up, called me a bitch and when I asked him to please be quiet and just drive he then told me to get out the car for questioning him”.she alleges that he ordered her out of the car and said “I hope you get raped”. “I just wanted to get back safely so I asked him to please just drive me as he was being paid to do – which received more swearing but I got back in the end.” The journey took 50 minutes instead of the usual 25, and when she arrived safely at her partner’s home safely,she immediately complained to Uber. A spokesperson said she was ‘shocked’ by the driver’s comment and condemned his “highly inappropriate language”. The company have apologised to the passenger, refunded her fare, and have ‘de-activated’ the driver while they investigate the incident. Uber said: “We were all really shocked to hear of this unacceptable incident. We have been in touch with the rider to make sure she is okay. With any serious incident such as this we of course suspend the driver while we investigate thoroughly.”th said she was ‘pretty shaken up’ but was glad it didn’t happen to someone more vulnerable. She is also ‘fearful’ that the aggressive driver has her home postcode. Whilst the 31-year-old said “Uber’s customer service have actually been pretty good,” she has deleted her Uber app and account and encouraged friends to do the same. “As for the driver – I’m not an awful person and I genuinely don’t want a person to lose their livelihood after stupid comments but some action obviously needs to be taken as he must think it’s okay to talk to women appallingly. I’ll certainly be interested to hear what Uber do about this.” “It’s really awful and it’s made me wary of minicabs. I guess we’ve spent all these years being told not to get into unlicensed cars by the government but then we don’t know how well the Uber drivers are being screened! For the sake of a few extra pounds I’ll be taking black cabs from now on!” This incident comes as black cab drivers gear up for a second protest aimed at raising awareness of safety risks in the city’s private hire vehicle business on May 26. The United Cabbies’ Group has already held one demo to make the public aware of an official report which says only half of minicab passengers say they always feel safe.
It is vital that we win over politicians to our cause if the taxi and minicab trade in London is to be properly regulated.
Yet whenever the LTDA does something with politicians to gain their support and raise the trades profile politically, many of those we are trying to win over suffer abuse from cabbies via twitter or other social media. It should not come as a surprise that this behaviour is not helping and that our enemies are using many of these tweets and comments to portray us as racist, xenophobes fighting competition.
Nothing is further from the truth; we are a forward thinking dynamic industry that is keen to embrace change and technology but one that is restrained within the confines of an archaic licensing infrastructure whilst our competitors are allowed to operate virtually unregulated.
Social media can be a powerful tool and I would encourage as many members as possible to use it, but to bear in mind that our competitor’s powerful PR and lobbying machine will be looking at ways to exploit everything you post.
This was evident in the recent ITV documentary ‘Taxi Wars’ where Uber managed to squeeze alleged tweets from taxi drivers into an otherwise truthful and damaging documentary about their activities and lobbyists, fortunately on this occasion I was able to dismiss the argument.
“Dynamic pricing” is how Uber describes its infamous surge pricing– a predatory trick anyone else would call “price gouging.” Critics ranging as far apart as industry competitors like Gett, feminist activist Gloria Steinem and even their own drivers have called out the shady practice. What’s even more sneaky about it is that research from Northeastern University has shown that surge pricing doesn’t increase the number of Uber drivers on the road, the way Uber always claimed it does. It just makes rides more expensive. So this holiday season, be armed with knowledge and don’t get swamped by Uber’s surge pricing like these poor folks!
Lenny was charged $490 for an 18-mile ride after a college football game in Indianapolis.
Gabby ended up needing to crowdfund to pay her rent after she was charged a 9x surge on her birthday, resulting in a charge of $360 for a 20 minute ride.
Caroline, who had to fight for several days to get Uber to reimburse a charge of $534 ($384 USD) from Uber Canada.
Russel, in the UK, was charged £109 ($162 USD) for what should have been a five milejourney.
Uber’s also a big fan of surging when public transportation options like buses or trains have mechanical difficulties or big delays. In Washington, D.C. this spring a 3 mile ride ended up costing over $34 while several metro lines were out of service; after Boston’s MBTA needed repairs during very snowy winter, Uber started regularly surging at 4x the normal rate; and even in their hometown of San Francisco, Uber was looking out for Number One during a BART outage by surging at 4.7 the usual rate.
Remember, just because surge pricing doesn’t always make headlines doesn’t mean it isn’t happening, or that you have to put up with it. Stay safe this holiday season and keep your wallet safe, too!
A joint venture focused on ride sharing will apparently be announced at CES.
Jonathan Gitlin
Google just found a major partner for its self-driving car program. A report from Yahoo Autos claims that, during CES, Ford will announce a joint venture between it and Google to build self-driving cars. The report describes the partnership as a step toward “a new business of automated ride sharing.”
Auto makers have long been wary of the liability problems with self-driving cars, but Ford and Google apparently plan to solve this by creating a joint venture that is “legally separate” from both parent companies. This way if something horrible happens and lawsuits are filed, the parent companies hope to be free of any legal issues. The report notes that the deal for Google’s technology is “understood to be non-exclusive,” allowing Google to make similar partnerships with other car manufacturers.
Google has been a pioneer in the self-driving car space, with over 1.3 million autonomous miles under its belt. The big question mark hanging over Google was always its plans for commercializing its autonomous driving tech, and it looks like it has found an answer in Ford. Building cars is an expensive proposition and was something Google always said it wasn’t interested in doing. Despite that, the company has been building its own self-driving prototypes, which can be configured without a steering wheel and pedals.
Ford has shown off a few self-developed, self-driving prototypes to the public and recently announced it would start publicly testing autonomous cars in California in 2016. The extra equipment required by self-driving cars is expected to be very expensive, making a ride sharing service—basically Uber without the drivers—a natural fit.
In hindsight, the two companies seem destined for each other. Google’s self-driving car division recently gained a “CEO” and is expected to be spun off into an Alphabet company. That CEO, John Krafcik, worked at Ford for 14 years.
Yahoo Autos says the deal will be announced by Ford during CES 2016, which takes place January 6-9.
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