TfL have today issued a press release to the trade, announcing the intended changes to the regulation regarding the mandating of credit card payment acceptance and the conditions attached.
After much ado about the customer surcharge being scrapped, we were originally informed that the driver would be responsible for any payment processing charge.
We were also told that in the interests of fairness, any charge would be capped at 3%. We were then told this would be non negotiable on our part.
But it seems it wasn’t non negotiable on the part of third party TfL partners who have said they can’t survive making a living off the backs of the Taxi trade with just a 3% charge.
And so our regulator scrapped the cap.
I recently asked TfL on the open forum of their Twitter Account if the cap had been scrapped….a simple question requiring a yes or no…and was given this:
I then asked the account, what regulation gives them the right to impose the mandate of card payments to self employed small business.
TfL have now given their third party partners, a blank cheque to make a charge to drivers of whatever they like. 10%-15%-20% etc…
TfL’ statement on this as being a commercial matter between individuals drivers and the card payment equipment suppliers, is misleading at best, as equipment suppliers can now charge whatever they like and the driver will no longer not have the option to refuse a card payment under these terms.
TfL make reference to the consultation of a 86% respondant wish for card acceptance, but fail to note a similar response to the driver not having to pay the customer surcharge. As usual, more TfL smoke and mirrors to push through a regulation that will effectively cut into drivers earnings and produce large income for third parties living off the backs of hard working licensed Taxi drivers.
These measures were passed at a recent board meeting on which sits the ex General Secretary of the largest Taxi Trade representative organisation. The issue seems to have been pushed through without properly dotting the I’s and crossing all the T’s.
No such mandate has been levied towards the Private Hire trade who can still demand cash, who can still charge customers card payment surcharges.
We have no protection if a supplier changes their terms and conditions to go from 3 times a week payout to monthly. What happens if a supplier goes out of business holding back a months worth of your takings?
Are we expected to soak up this lose as well?
Will TfL guarantee payment in the event of agent bankruptcies?
What happens if the Supplier suddenly puts up their surcharge to 15%-20%?
What protection if any, does the driver have?
Also from the 3rd of October 2016 all card transactions will require a card payment receipt (not just a printed meter receipt). This will render existing printers connected to meter redundant. More expense for the driver.
Just another example of TfL’s bias towards the licensed Taxi Trade.
As we at Taxi Leaks said all along, be careful what you wish for….and now we’ve been proved right, as the whole trade is about to be shafted by the greed of third parties sucking the financial blood out of the trade, with the total blessing of the board of TfL.
Below is today’s Press Release from TfL
Credit and debit card and contactless payments to be accepted in all London taxis
Credit and debit card mandate
All London taxis will be required to accept card payments, including contactless, from 3 October 2016, making travelling by taxi easier and a more attractive option for passengers.
The acceptance of card and contactless payments was the subject of a Transport for London (TfL) consultation at the end of last year that found 86 per cent of respondents backed card acceptance, with 68 per cent agreeing that passengers should also be able to pay using contactless payments.
TfL also committed to work with the card payment industry to link card payment devices directly to the taximeter in future.
The changes in relation to card payments are as follows:
2 April 2016
The existing card payment surcharge of up to 10% or £1, whichever is greater, will be removed from 2 April 2016. After this date taxi drivers must not charge passengers a surcharge when accepting credit or debit card payments
To help taxi drivers recoup the costs to them of accepting card payments, an additional 20 pence will be added to the flagfall of all taxi journeys making the new flagfall for 2016/17 £2.60
Any existing signage that advises passengers there is a card payment surcharge must be removed
3 October 2016
All taxis must be fitted with a TfL approved card payment system within the passenger compartment
All taxi drivers must accept credit and debit card payments (VISA and MasterCard as a minimum)
All taxi drivers must accept contactless, Chip and PIN and magnetic swipe. Where a taxi is not fitted with an approved TfL card payment system or found to have a broken or faulty system this may have licensing implications.
TfL approved card payment systems
The current list of TfL approved card payment devices and systems are laid out in the table below:
TfL is working with card payment systems suppliers to ensure they are prepared to meet the changes, which include the new requirement that a card payment terminal must be fitted within the passenger compartment. All TfL approved card payment systems must continue to have the facility to print card transaction receipts in accordance with the following:
All 25m passengers who used the service in the US between January 2013 and January 2016 will receive money.
Uber has agreed to the payout after a US lawsuit
Uber has agreed to pay $28.5m (£19.6m) to its US customers to settle two class-action lawsuits over its “safe rides” fee.
It has agreed to stop using phrases like “the safest ride on the road” and “gold-standard background checks” in its advertising, after plaintiffs said customers may have been misled.
Uber said its “safe rides” fee enabled industry-leading background checks on would-be drivers.
But Uber didn’t do the kind of fingerprint checks required of taxi drivers.
As part of the settlement, Uber says it will rename the fee as a “booking fee”, which will go towards operating costs and background checks.
The class action covers all 25m passengers who used Uber in the US between 1 January 2013 and 1 January 2016.
But after legal fees, the riders are likely to receive only about a dollar each.
The judge must approve the settlement first, in a process that could take up to six months.
The “safe rides” fee varies from city to city – standing at $1.20 in Seattle, and $1.35 in San Francisco. No fee is applied in New York.
Uber has pointed out that its technology – such as GPS tracking and sharing driver’s photo identification and number plate before the passenger gets into the car – does improve safety.
A spokesman said: “We are glad to put these cases behind us and we will continue to invest in new technology and great customer services so that we can help improve safety in the cities we serve.”
Another critical class-action lawsuit against Uber in California could go to jury trial as early as June.
It will be decided whether Uber drivers should be considered employees or independent contractors, as they are currently.
If they are considered employees, they would be entitled to additional employee benefits.
I have spent quite a bit of time lately thinking about autonomous cars, and I wanted to summarize my current thoughts and predictions. Most people – experts included – seem to think that the transition to driverless vehicles will come slowly over the coming few decades, and that large hurdles exist for widespread adoption. I believe that this is significant underestimation. Autonomous cars will be commonplace by 2025 and have a near monopoly by 2030, and the sweeping change they bring will eclipse every other innovation our society has experienced. They will cause unprecedented job loss and a fundamental restructuring of our economy, solve large portions of our environmental problems, prevent tens of thousands of deaths per year, save millions of hours with increased productivity, and create entire new industries that we cannot even imagine from our current vantage point.
The transition is already beginning to happen. Elon Musk, Tesla Motor’s CEO, says that their 2015 models will be able to self-drive 90 percent of the time.1 And the major automakers aren’t far behind – according to Bloomberg News, GM’s 2017 models will feature “technology that takes control of steering, acceleration and braking at highway speeds of 70 miles per hour or in stop-and-go congested traffic.”2 Both Google3 and Tesla4 predict that fully-autonomous cars – what Musk describes as “true autonomous driving where you could literally get in the car, go to sleep and wake up at your destination” – will be available to the public by 2020.
How it will unfold
Industry experts think that consumers will be slow to purchase autonomous cars – while this may be true, it is a mistake to assume that this will impede the transition. Morgan Stanley’s research shows that cars are driven just 4% of the time,5 which is an astonishing waste considering that the average cost of car ownership is nearly $9,000 per year.6 Next to a house, an automobile is the second most expensive asset that most people will ever buy – it is no surprise that ride sharing services like Uber and car sharing services like Zipcar are quickly gaining popularity as an alternative to car ownership. It is now more economical to use a ride sharing service if you live in a city and drive less than 10,000 miles per year.7 The impact on private car ownership is enormous: a UC-Berkeley study showed that vehicle ownership among car sharing users was cut in half.8 The car purchasers of the future will not be you and me – cars will be purchased and operated by ride sharing and car sharing companies.
And current research confirms that we would be eager to use autonomous cars if they were available. A full 60% of US adults surveyed stated that they would ride in an autonomous car9 , and nearly 32% said they would not continue to drive once an autonomous car was available instead.10 But no one is more excited than Uber – drivers take home at least 75% of every fare.11 It came as no surprise when CEO Travis Kalanick recently stated that Uber will eventually replace all of its drivers with self-driving cars.12
A Columbia University study suggested that with a fleet of just 9,000 autonomous cars, Uber could replace every taxi cab in New York City13 – passengers would wait an average of 36 seconds for a ride that costs about $0.50 per mile.14Such convenience and low cost will make car ownership inconceivable, and autonomous, on-demand taxis – the ‘transportation cloud’ – will quickly become dominant form of transportation – displacing far more than just car ownership, it will take the majority of users away from public transportation as well. With their $41 billion valuation,15 replacing all 171,000 taxis16in the United States is well within the realm of feasibility – at a cost of $25,000 per car, the rollout would cost a mere $4.3 billion.
Fallout
The effects of the autonomous car movement will be staggering. PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts that the number of vehicles on the road will be reduced by 99%, estimating that the fleet will fall from 245 million to just 2.4 million vehicles.17
Disruptive innovation does not take kindly to entrenched competitors – like Blockbuster, Barnes and Noble, Polaroid, and dozens more like them, it is unlikely that major automakers like General Motors, Ford, and Toyota will survive the leap. They are geared to produce millions of cars in dozens of different varieties to cater to individual taste and have far too much overhead to sustain such a dramatic decrease in sales. I think that most will be bankrupt by 2030, while startup automakers like Tesla will thrive on a smaller number of fleet sales to operators like Uber by offering standardized models with fewer options.
Ancillary industries such as the $198 billion automobile insurance market,18 $98 billion automotive finance market,19 $100 billion parking industry,20 and the $300 billion automotive aftermarket21 will collapse as demand for their services evaporates. We will see the obsolescence of rental car companies, public transportation systems, and, good riddance, parking and speeding tickets. But we will see the transformation of far more than just consumer transportation: self-driving semis, buses, earth movers, and delivery trucks will obviate the need for professional drivers and the support industries that surround them.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics lists that 884,000 people are employed in motor vehicles and parts manufacturing, and an additional 3.02 million in the dealer and maintenance network.22 Truck, bus, delivery, and taxi drivers account for nearly 6 million professional driving jobs. Virtually all of these 10 million jobs will be eliminated within 10-15 years, and this list is by no means exhaustive.
But despite the job loss and wholesale destruction of industries, eliminating the needs for car ownership will yield over $1 trillion in additional disposable income – and that is going to usher in an era of unprecedented efficiency, innovation, and job creation.
A view of the future
Morgan Stanley estimates that a 90% reduction in crashes would save nearly 30,000 lives and prevent 2.12 million injuries annually.23 Driverless cars do not need to park – vehicles cruising the street looking for parking spots account for an astounding 30% of city traffic,24 not to mention that eliminating curbside parking adds two extra lanes of capacity to many city streets. Traffic will become nonexistent, saving each US commuter 38 hours every year – nearly a full work week.25 As parking lots and garages, car dealerships, and bus stations become obsolete, tens of millions of square feet of available prime real estate will spur explosive metropolitan development.
The environmental impact of autonomous cars has the potential to reverse the trend of global warming and drastically reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. Passenger cars, SUVs, pickup trucks, and minivans account for 17.6% of greenhouse gas emissions26 – a 90% reduction of vehicles in operation would reduce our overall emissions by 15.9%. As most autonomous cars are likely to be electric, we would virtually eliminate the 134 billion of gasoline used each year in the US alone.27 And while recycling 242 million vehicles will certainly require substantial resources, the surplus of raw materials will decrease the need for mining.
But perhaps most exciting for me are the coming inventions, discoveries, and creation of entire new industries that we cannot yet imagine.
I dream of the transportation cloud: near-instantly available, point-to-point travel. Ambulances that arrive to the scene within seconds. A vehicle-to-grid distributed power system. A merging of city and suburb as commuting becomes fast and painless. Dramatically improved mobility for the disabled. On-demand rental of nearly anything you can imagine. The end of the DMV!
They came from every org, lanyards of every colour, from all over London.
Taxi drivers came from Farnborough, Basingstoke, Manchester and Liverpool…
They also came from France, Spain and Belgium.
A truly United trade demonstration
A United trade that TfL have always feared.
London ground to a halt.
Speaking with one of the senior commanders, he informed me that the police had estimated around 9-10,000 Taxis actually turned out to protest.
It was amazing to see how many friends and family members of Taxi drivers came along to protest on foot.
Roads around Central London soon became gridlocked. Russel Square, Covent Garden, Victoria Embankment, Fleet Street, Aldwych, Strand, Piccadilly, The Mall, Pall Mall…nothing was moving.
All around Victoria Street, Birdcage Walk, Milbank, just lines of stationery Taxis.
Police insisted stationery cabs on Whitehall, switched off their engines. This had the knock on effect of reducing noise levels.
Because so many Taxis turned up early, traffic cops decided to enforce a special Traffic Management Order restricting admission from Trafalgar Square into Whitehall and many Taxis were diverted along the Mall, where they were Kettled.
The overflow of Taxis went along the Mall, past the QVM and along Constitution Hill, all the way to Hyde Park Corner.
Traffic officers on the Charles1st roundabout, were turning away Knowledge Students, when I questioned why, they became very aggressive, saying they had specific instructions to only allow taxis into Whitehall and were enforcing this to the letter.
Towards the end of the Demo, I lodged a complaint with the gold commander that the Knowledge Students turned away, had equal rights to protest along the side of Taxi drivers. He said he would push our complaint up the chain of command and said a statement would be made, if and when we have subsequent protests.
One Knowledge student was arrested by an over zealous traffic officer for wilful obstruction.
But after protests were made to th Bronze commander and also the Superintendent in charge, the student was un-arrested.
As the demo drew to conclusion, the UCG’s campaign manager Trevor Merrells, told the assembled drivers:
“This is only the beginning….No retreat….No surrender”.
Black cab drivers have brought traffic to a standstill in Westminster with a protest outside Downing Street this afternoon – saying they are battling to defend their livelihoods.
Thousands of cab drivers swamped Whitehall from about 2pm as a cacophony of car horns filled the air to signal the start of a 90-minute protest against transport bosses and minicab app Uber.
The demonstration was called by the United Cabbies Group (UCG), which accuses the government of “supporting” Uber and failing to properly regulate the service, allowing the global tech company a “competitive advantage”.
Cab drivers say the success of Uber has hit them hard, with takings down by up to 30 per cent – but they remained defiant today saying they will keep protesting and stopping traffic until “something is done”.
Anger: Thousands of cabbies descended on Whitehall
The UCG said in a statement: “We are talking about the livelihoods of tens of thousands of drivers and their families.
“Londoners who value their traditional taxi service should rally round it and send a signal to the candidates in the London mayoral election that they will support those of them who give a clear pledge to put an end to the unfair practices of Uber and protect the iconic heritage of London that London taxis represent.”
Campaign: Taxi driver Carlos Oliveira says his livelihood is under threat
Taxi drivers say TfL is giving out far too many minicab licences for there to be enough work to go around, with hundreds being approved each week.
They also complain that London’s transport bosses are not doing enough to stop some minicab drivers from touting for trade on the streets, which they are not licensed to do.
Carlos Oliveira, 58, a taxi driver for nearly 30 years, said: “I’m here to try to embarrass the Mayor into enforcing laws which already exist.
“Imagine you run a butcher’s shop and every week 6,000 new butcher’s shops open on your street and the next street.
“Since Uber came in it’s killing us.”
Defiant: Taxi driver Andrew Page
Andrew Page, 55, a former printer who has been driving a cab for 10 years, said: “We have had enough, this is the first of a series of actions.
We have had enough, this is the first of a series of actions
Cabbie Andrew Page
“It’s very tough but we will fight until it’s finished.”
He added: “We disrupt traffic in London for two hours and the police give us a disorder notice.
“Uber disrupts an entire industry and they get dinner with Osborne and Cameron.”
Queues: Taxi drivers in Whitehall
Jonjon Dale, 47, who runs the Cabstop taxi garage in Kingston, was at the protest to support drivers.
He said: “We’re here in support because we’ve all got to stay together. There’s a lot of behind the scenes stuff for taxi drivers – garages, cafes.
“If they go down, we go down with them. Drivers are not earning what they used to earn and that has an effect on us.”
He added: “I think this is a fight that we can win. It’s going well today, there’s been a big turnout and a lot of support.
“This is going to keep happening until something is done.”
Another driver, Sean Dugdale, 47, said the real targets of the protest are the government and TfL, rather than Uber.
He said: “I’m suffering, my take is down about 30 per cent. I gave up four years of my life to do the Knowledge, but the government are just leading us to wrack and ruin.”
The protest comes on the day taxi drivers lost a high profile legal battle against Boris Johnson’s flagship cycle superhighway scheme.
A seperate trade body, the Licensed Taxi Drivers Association, argued that the introduction of a segregated cycle route on the Victoria Embankment breached planning rules, but the High Court rejected its claim today.
Tom Elvidge, general manager of Uber in London, said: “This protest was sparked when Transport for London dropped plans for bureaucratic new rules on licensed private hire drivers, such as five minute minimum waiting times.
“But Londoners made clear they didn’t want to be slowed down with more than 200,000 opposing those proposals.
“We believe black cabs and services like Uber can co-exist in the capital.
“That’s why earlier this week we announced that black cab drivers can use our app to get extra custom with zero service fee paid to Uber for a year.
“By making the most of new technology we can all improve services for passengers and keep London moving.”
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