North / south / east / west of the river? Nah chance, mate
If China switched off all electric robo-taxis remotely, would we notice?
“Taxiiiii!”
This is the word I am not shouting as I pace back and forth along the kerb. Nor am I waving my hand frantically to hail a ride like some 12-year-old classroom swot hissing “Sir! Sir! Sir!”
I need both hands to operate my smartphone, you see. Did I write “operate”? I meant “pummel into submission”.
OK boomer, I hear you groan, this is how you call a taxi these days; get used to it. And this is why I am struggling to persuade an app to call me a taxi while it does everything in its power to prevent me.
The irony is not lost. My experience of personally hailing taxis in the street was gained exclusively late at night while pacing the damp kerbs of London. If you do this, there is a 99% chance that the licensed hackney cab driver will stop, ask for your destination, say “Nah, mate, ah’m on me way ’ome” and drive the fuck off.
So, much like the taxi app I am poking at right now.
By the way, my above-mentioned difficulty with so-called ‘black cabs’ was solved by moving house to the south-eastern London borough of Bromley. No cab driver refuses to take you to Bromley on their way, er, ’ome as that’s where they all live, innit.
This is no help to me now on a bone-dry kerb in Montpellier. There are precious few licensed taxis in this city anyway because, thanks to congestion, it’s not a city you can sensibly navigate by car. Big towns back in Blighty tend to tackle this challenge by introducing hugely annoying city-wide one-way systems. Here in Montpellier, they just erect barriers at either end of every essential artery road, dig up the entire street and leave it as rubble indefinitely.
The only way to get about is by bicycle. But every bike ride is, by definition, a one-way trip: your bike will be stolen within minutes of chaining it up at your destination. Bicycle is thus the most expensive way to travel as you have to buy a new one for every journey. It’s the most polluting method too, as every stolen bike is whisked away to Eastern Europe by the dirty lorry-full. At least every time they steal your car, it gets shipped to North Africa ecologically by boat.
When I last booked a taxi to the train station a few years ago, it turned into an I-Spy game (as in “…something beginning with ‘G’…”) as we approached the station over and over again from different directions, only to have the traffic diverted elsewhere due to roadworks just as we got close. So there’s no surprise that the only taxis passing by at this very moment as I stand at the pavement edge are occupied, the drivers with helpless expressions on their faces, their kidnapped passengers looking increasingly panicked as they pass within 50 metres of their drop-off for the seventh time.
There is no stopping in the Red Zone, you see. Or is that the White Zone?
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