5 posts tagged “taxi”

My friend Tanya took this of the two Toyota Prius taxis that we were behind last month. I had blogged about it earlier. This is a better shot, taken on a proper digital camera.

When I was a kid, a cabbie living on Colombo Street had a Ford Cortina Mk II for his or her work.
   This was a far smaller car than the usual Holden Belmonts and Kingswoods and Ford Falcons that formed over 95 per cent of the taxi fleet in Wellington.
   I don’t know if (s)he got much business as part of Capital City Cabs, easily the minor player in a town that was dominated by Wellington Taxis and Black & White and Grey Cabs Ltd.
   Today I tailed a Toyota Belta taxicab. This was a Japanese import, and is better known as the Yaris Sedan or Vios in other nations.
   The funny thing is, it didn’t look funny.
   (Those darned Prius taxicabs look funny. They are even funnier on the motorway lugging hundreds of kilograms of batteries and hurting the environment. Especially in a city where cabs have largely been running clean natural gas since the early 1980s.)
   The reason the Belta didn’t look as odd as the Cortina is more testament to how little cars have grown over the years.
   Cabbies in Wellington have been defecting from the Australian full-size sedans to Nissan Cefiros and Teanas for a while, and Toyotas are, as in Dunedin, filling up the taxi ranks.
   Ford diehards are going for the Mondeo, which is larger than the Falcon anyway in most key measurements (width, rear legroom)—just it has a smaller engine and there’s a diesel option.
   If one considers that the Belta comes from the lineage of the Publica and Starlet, then it is tiny.
   But if one considers that the Belta has a very long wheelbase and that it is as wide as mid-sized cars were a decade ago, then no wonder it didn’t look small.
   Small cars are actually quite big, and big enough for most families these days. The only thing that keeps us thinking of them as small is snobbery.
   In fact, the only thing that would look really funny in 2008 is an overly large car, such as a Ford Fairlane, being a cab, especially one not converted to LPG.

From Autocade

Toyota Belta/Toyota Vios. 2005 to date (prod. unknown). 4-door sedan. F/F, 996, 1296, 1495 cm³ (4 cyl. DOHC). Essentially a booted second-generation Vitz, but designed at Toyota’s Japanese studio rather than its French one, predominantly for Asian markets. Sold also as the Yaris sedan in the US and Australasia; Vios in most export markets. Interior duller than Vitz; handling acceptable for a reasonably tall car.

Some more photos to share from around Wellington, New Zealand, and to show it’s not always sunny!

   This is actually Chews Lane but I thought it was strange seeing a second sign, on the opposite side, reading Tow Away Lane—but in the style of a regular street-name sign. Hence the filename Odd Name for a Street. Across the road is the local HQ for the Fairfax Press.    A lot of cities have fleets of so-called “green cabs” and Wellington is no exception. There are these ugly little eggs running around called Toyota Priuses, which may have looked good for about, ooh, one Oscar telecast’s arrivals. After that, they got pretentious.
   This one has the licence plate 0 SMOG. But it’s a hybrid, so when the petrol engine is in play, it does generate something out of the exhaust, surely? I know we have unleaded fuel and catalytic converters, but from what little I know of emissions this still generates more pollution than the regular Ford Falcon LPG cabs that run around Wellington—which, technically, should have this plate. If Wellington’s main taxi company is clever, it can tell us how many LPG Falcons it has running and compare the quantity to the fleet of these Green Cabs.
   I think Green Cabs is doing a good thing, generally, and certainly a Prius’s interior room is sufficient for most journeys, but I can remember the 1980s when most cabs here ran on natural gas, be they Holdens or Fords, and generated far less pollution than modern cars. We have, of course, the National Government of the 1990s to thank for their demise, and the Labour Government to continue its “rival’s” (ha ha) folly.    People my age will remember the Trades’ Hall and how it was the site of a bombing in the mid-1980s. Caretaker Ernie Abbott was the victim of the after-hours blast. I don’t think it was ever solved and I wonder if it qualifies as our first terrorist bombing.
   Trevor Loudon shares some theories on his blog but he admits they are hearsay. He refutes the rumour that it was a right-wing group and instead points to Marxists and various pro-Soviet groups committed to unseating the Muldoon Government. The irony is that the Labour Government that followed proved more anti-union and right-wing than they might have expected. One commenter on Mr Loudon’s blog wrote, ‘If your theory is true Trevor then the irony of the outcome was classic. They got a Labour Government alright, but it contained good’uns like Douglas, Prebble, Bassett, De Cleene, Caygill & Moore.’
   However, Loudon is also right in responding, ‘True Spirit, but the Soviets also got NZ's anti nuclear policies and the destruction of ANZUS. Which do you think the Soviets cared about most?’
   Whatever the case, we began losing a lot of our values and the integrity of our national system that decade, after the change in government. We can trace the growing gap between rich and poor right back to 1984, when we moved from a reasonably egalitarian and fair society to one which has an underclass and domination by foreign corporations.