Taxi. Licenses, sharing, second guides and monitoring: the Municipality's plan to balance supply and demand
Taxi. Licenses, sharing, second guides and monitoring: the Municipality's plan to balance supply and demand
The meeting with the taxi drivers will take place on Friday 31 May. The study on the time slots in which it is most difficult to find a car and the Administration's proposals were presented. Granelli: “We want to increase the service to citizens and the opportunities for license holders”
Milan, June 1 2019 - Five hundred new licences, Taxi sharing, Second guides and Service monitoring: these are the four measures proposed by the Administration to increase the Taxi service in the time slots in which customer demand exceeds the supply of available cars.
They were presented this afternoon by Mobility Councilor Marco Granelli during a meeting with the taxi drivers' associations.
The taxi service in Milan is one of the excellences of Milanese mobility, fundamental for offering opportunities to those who live in the city and for those who frequent it for work, study, tourism, culture and entertainment or to access services. Milan wants to fight traffic congestion and pollution, and taxis are an essential part of this challenge. Traffic certainly penalizes the quality of life and growth of the city, and also the taxi service itself, also compressed into the saturated spaces of the city. The need to strengthen the public service offered to citizens in certain time slots on weekdays and holidays emerges from a study conducted by the Municipality on outstanding calls.
The analysis shows that during the week it is more difficult for users to find a taxi from 8 to 10 in the morning (15 percent of outstanding calls) and from 19 to 21 pm (27 percent of outstanding calls), while at the weekend the the most difficult hours are those from 19pm to 21pm (31 percent of calls answered) and from midnight to 5am (42 percent of calls missed).
“With these interventions we intend to increase the service to citizens and strengthen the offering capacity of each individual licensee - explained councilor Granelli -. The objective of the Municipality is to strengthen the service also through discussions with the taxi drivers who operate the service every day in the city. Together we can start an overall project that helps the city and those who work there to grow. I was able to appreciate the willingness of the taxi drivers' organizations to participate, to provide observations and indications, even critical ones, for improvement: a good, responsible way to collaborate in the success of our city. With double guides, for example, which do not involve additional charges, it will be possible to extend working hours up to 16 hours divided into two shifts, creating jobs. The general intent of these measures is to bring an already high-level service up to the standards of large international cities: in terms of offer, accessibility, environmental sustainability".
The four measures in detail:
SERVICE MONITORING
The intention is to constantly analyze the development of the shift system, ensuring that its variations and its structure allow for the best functioning.
DOUBLE GUIDES
License holders will be able to request the activation of the second guide associated with their license without charges. This will allow us to increase the taxi service offer and, by extending the working hours associated with each licence, will help to better cover the hours, especially the evening/night ones.
Two drivers can be employed with a total time commitment of 16 hours, with shifts of eight hours or ten plus six. In this way the single license and the single taxi are maximized, offering greater job opportunities.
Whoever activates the second guide will have to guarantee electronic payments for taxi users.
TAXI SHARING
The service will allow a single taxi to carry multiple people, either headed to the same place, or even with partially different but integrated or combinable routes. Here too, the use of the same vehicle is maximized, saving customers, improving traffic, increasing the offer and therefore also the job opportunities for taxi drivers.
NEW LICENSES
The proposal provides for 500 new taxi licenses, all electric, half equipped for disabled people, the other half with an hourly restriction, to encourage greater adequacy of supply to demand. There will be a tender and those who access it will have to purchase the licenses for a value that will be determined by the Municipality. The resources obtained will be allocated, as required by law, partly to all taxi drivers and partly for investments in the city aimed at improving the service.
The package also includes actions by the Administration to equip the city and taxi parks with electric charging stations, useful for encouraging the replacement of vehicles towards a sustainable mobility scenario.
Now the Administration awaits observations in the short term, in view of the activation of the package of measures, to help Milan grow: many appointments await us and we want to offer more and more integrated, accessible and sustainable mobility.
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Updated: 04/06/2019