Aussie wrote on May 31
st, 2017 at 2:11pm:
Now now! That's a fib. A very bad one at that. No Taxi in Qld can be more than 6 years old, that is, until very recently when the Government (in its stupidity) dropped the age limit. That was so recently that it simply would have been impossible for that Cab if yours to have been 13 years old.
Further, while the Govt has dropped that limit, Booking and Despatch Companies (like Yellow and Black & White) have insisted that all vehicles under their envelope must be less than six years old.
Yeah I thought that was the case, but I owned a 2004 Toyota Hiace Commuter (well, I didn't have the commuter model) and that's what he was driving, it was unmistakable. We even had a nice conversation on the way there, firstly for him thanking me for getting him out of my area (lots of old people using the taxi's to get to and from the shops, $10 fares max etc) and back close to the "CBD" (if you can consider the Gold Coast as having a CBD), and then he was telling me that it wasn't his van, he's just the driver and he didn't care about thrashing it and he thought it was an old piece of poo.
He was explaining what "Taxi Green" was as he was a whisker from running a red light, he accelerated hard and just made it through on the Yellow.
As an FYI, there are 3 colours on the traffic lights, Green, Yellow and Taxi Green (aka Red) apparently.
I appreciate that he'd been dealing with tiny fare snowies all day so he let his tongue rip when telling me about how crappy the van was and since we're all aussies I have no problem with a taxi driver swearing etc during conversation and I could tell he'd been holding it in all morning.
He was very eager to stress that even though he was a maxi, because I only booked for one I would only get charged the standard rate, so don't let that confuse the $70 vs $25 difference either.
I honestly thought that there were age restrictions on the cars. He was a Yellow Cab (the orange and black ones) and I thought maybe as a way to reduce regulation to help the taxi industry compete with Uber that they'd removed some of those provisions. Clearly mine was an out of the ordinary experience then.
It's just shame that's been the last taxi I've taken for a while. The next closest after Uber is driving to the Training Station to head up and down to Brissy, or door to door busses to the airport but even that might stop now that I've got a collection of Uber Drivers personal cards for when I need an airport run...