I know I know. There’s only one person in the whole world who likes clicking through huge collections of photos of London taxis with adverts on them. Me. But such galleries of persuasive transport are now easy for me to put up here, and have always been easy for you to ignore, so here’s another, consisting of fifty-four taxis-with-adverts photoed by me in the latter half of last year:
Photo 49, bottom row, number four, features Ms Calzedonia, a shapely lady with writing on her legs. But even my original 4000×3000 photo did not enable me to discern what this writing says and my googling also proved insufficient. Anyone?
Also puzzling, merely from my photo number 40, is “Duolingo”, but this was easy to learn about, and pretty easy to guess. It’s for learning a new language.
I’m sure you could make some “Art” out of these pictures. The London taxi is very politically interesting. Peter Hendy, the head of Transport for London when the congestion charge was introduced, famously didn’t want them to be able to use bus lanes since they weren’t “proper” public transport, being expensive and elitist. They are predominantly driven by white men, caricatured as having unsophisticated right wing views and many supplement their income by covering their traditional “black-cab-ness” with the garish consumer and financial services industry advertising images which your pictures show so well. Ubers, on the other hand are typically driven by poorer immigrants and being cheaper are more available to the masses. Yet now TfL and the mayor, Sadiq Khan, defends the privelege of the LTDA against Uber.
I am with Peter Hendy, who ran TfL exceedingly well, by the way. I don’t see any reason why black taxis should have a privilege over minicabs, ubers, or even private cars. Bus lanes should be for buses and emergency vehicles. If any other cars are to be given permission to use them, this should be simply tolled – pay an extra charge and you can use the bus lane. This would probably then lead to taxis (black or other) charging a surcharge to passengers for using the bus lanes. Which is fine.
Black taxi drivers are used to having a captured regulator in the form of the Public Carriage Office. This is now part of TfL. I have friends who work in other parts of TfL. I get the impression that other parts of TfL don’t like the PCO much.