Stop this madness, this taxi-mania
When justice is gone, ritual will follow. Ritual is the product of scant integrity, the beginning of chaos.
Dao De Jing (Chapter 38)
LAST WEEK was an extremely painful one for at least two members of the pedestrian public who, while walking along Eastwood Park Road, were mowed down and seriously injured by a lunatic taxi driver.
When I first saw the video footage of the incident, I thought it was a clip from a Hollywood movie. It was sometime later that I heard about the incident on the news. It was freaky: people being mowed down like cattle while going about their business in a public space – the sidewalk of a major roadway. Is there any place where we are safe from maniac taxi drivers now?
To add insult to injury, the driver was able to beat a hasty departure from the scene. How come? In what one would term civil societies, the louse would have been immediately held and handed over to the police and the matter expeditiously dealt with through the courts.
In less civil societies where formal justice is merely a fleeting illusion, he would have been held and beaten, perhaps to death, and then they would have found the owner of the taxi and meted out similar ‘justice’ on him, his family and his property. Inasmuch as we believe that we are not in this bracket, remember the forklift driver who was killed by a mob just last week on Ricketts Crescent in the aftermath of a splashing incident. This mowing down of pedestrians is but another saga involving lunatic and dangerous taxi drivers. There was the recent video of one driver who, in his bid to evade the police, drove off with a car full of passengers, ignoring their desperate calls for him to let them out. And, let’s not forget the one who thought it prudent to block Member of Parliament ,Juliet Cuthbert’s vehicle, and menacingly approached her with a knife.
PALTRY FINES
Coupled with such lunacy are cases of ridiculously paltry fines, imposed on drivers who amassed hundreds of unpaid traffic tickets. I get one ticket for travelling 15 kilometres per hour above the speed limit and incur a penalty of $8,000, yet these ignominious drivers pay an average of $5 per ticket! Where is the justice?
Where is the justice when a reckless taxi driver permanently alters the shape of your high-end vehicle, forcing you to fork out millions to effect repairs, only to be told that his third-party insurance coverage was monkey money which has to be shared between you and the passengers in the taxi at the time of the accident? Where is the justice when, having failed to recover your costs from the taxi owner’s insurance company, your efforts to recover the balance through the courts are thwarted and frustrated at every turn?
Given the history of recklessness and accidents attributable to taxi drivers, why is it that taxis are being allowed to operate with paltry third-party insurance coverage? Truth be told, taxi drivers are public nuisances who have long frustrated thousands of law-abiding road users and are a growing danger to pedestrians and other drivers alike. Adequate third-party insurance coverage is therefore a no-brainer.
The time is long past to put a stop to this madness, this taxi-mania. If the authorities fail in their obligation to protect us from these lunatics, then there will come a day when, out of unbridled frustration, we impose our own justice: at the rate things are going now, that day is not far off.
Heed the words of the Dao De Jing: ritual in the absence of justice is much too high an opportunity cost for regulatory inaction.