Transport for London has decided it knows what will keep me safe better than I do. The transport regulator has today refused to reissue Uber’s private hire licence, on the basis of ‘public safety and security implications’.
Let me tell you about security implications as a woman in London. If I come out of a club or bar in the middle of the night, I do not want to be hanging around alone on the pavement for half an hour while my minicab fails to materialise, engaged in a frustrating negotiation with the operator about where exactly my driver is. I don’t want to trawl the streets in the hope of finding a black cab to hail down, only to be told my zone 3 address is too out of the way for them. And if I do manage to convince a driver to take me home, I don’t want to be forced to pay over the odds, because the taxi lobby has successfully bullied any competition off the roads.
Yes, we have the night Tube now – on weekends, on certain lines, and only after a prolonged battle with the unions over whether it was acceptable to hire new drivers to take the antisocial-hour shifts current employees reject.
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