BUSY TIME FOR TAXIS

Press, Volume LXXXV, Issue 25995, 24 December 1949, Page 6

BUSY TIME FOR TAXIS

CARS BOOKED OUT AN HOUR AHEAD MANY REQUESTS DECLINED “I am sorry, but we are booked up for an hour ahead,’! was the reply of operators in taxi firms’ telephone exchanges from late yesterday afternoon until well on in the evening, as thousands of holiday makers sought taxis to enter and leave the city, and par-cel-laden Christmas shoppers sought transport home. During the peak period, from about 5 p.m. to 11 p.m., taxi firms found it impossible to cope with the demand, and nad to use their own discretion in meeting the most deserving cases, such as people wanting to catch trains. At the exchange of one firm, the operator handled incoming calls at the rate of several a minute.

By 9.30 p.m. the people seeking taxis must have numbered hundreds, judging from the lights on the control board of one firm’s exchange. A reporter counted seven calls in 60 seconds—and they all had to be turned away. The callers were apparently ringing not in hope, but in despair. Few asked for a taxi —they had apparently been turned away by other firms before, and merely said: “Any hope of a cab?” Bookings are heavy this morning for taxis to take people to the railway station, and one firm has even had to turn away a request, perhaps genuine, for a cab to attend a funeral in the morning. Members of one firm said the demand was the heaviest for any Christmas on record, but. the manager of another firm said he did not think it was any worse than the usual Christmas rush. A firm which has installed radiotelephone equipment in about 38 of its 92 cars employed five exchange operators last evening—two more than usual, and they were working hard. They said that the new systejn was proving a boon with the Christmas rush, as the demand could be met more easily with radio-telephone in use to direct cars straight to their destinations. They were booked out for an hour ahead at 9.30 p.m. The manager of one .firm said that people did not realise that the most important thing was to get people to their trains. People waiting at the station to get transport to their homes were annoyed when they saw a taxi leaving empty. “They do not realise that if it stopped to pick them up it might mean that someone else would miss his train, and have his holiday ruined,” he said. The general opinion among taxi firms last evening was that they might get through the holiday period on the extra petrol allocation “with a bit of scratching.” An extra allocation—-30 gallons for double shift .and 20 gallons tor single shift, has been made. In Wellington, this Christmas has provided the greatest turnover in taxi orders in history. Yesterday morning it reached the proportions of a call-a-minute service.