The health pandemic it has derivatives everywhere. Is a butterfly flapping full-fledged, because it has lying down tourism and has forced the pickpockets looking for alternativesLike robbing uptown kids or looking for the careless taxi drivers. And from that virus, these sludge; and the protest this Wednesday through the streets of Barcelona with the stamp of this combative sector: slow march, noise, firecrackers, stand under the public manager so you can hear your claims and the threat taken from ‘Trapped in time’: if there is no affirmative answer, boicot al Mobile World Congress. They want to install security cameras in the vehicle but there are serious legal doubts about the proposal. The alternative is reinforce the 112 channel itself, a silent alarm that drivers activate if necessary. But is there really more insecurity in the Barcelona taxi?
The call to Mossos d’Esquadra does not shed excessive light. Not a bit, actually. Because a spokesperson for the Catalan police explains to this newspaper that crimes are classified by type, not by sector. That is, in order to settle how many complaints are from taxi drivers, in the absence of a filter by professions, you would have to enter one by one and that is materially impossible. The group, however, assures that the thing has gone from mother. It has shot up. In terms of figures and in terms of sensations. The last straw was the stabbing, on December 16, of a taxi driver in front of the Boqueria and in broad daylight, while leaving a passenger. That is why this Wednesday they have taken to the streets. One hundred vehicles, according to the Urban Guard; half a thousand, according to the organizers.
As often happens with many matters that have to do with the taxi, passion and vehemence are mixed with the regulations, the secrecy of the Administration and the global photo of a guild haunted by the crisis and new technologies. We are facing a sector that has gotten the hang of mobilization. Apart from the longshoremen or TMB staff, is probably the one that best has the measure of public affairs. They will think that if they did well against Uber, with a Government decree that drove the multinational company out of the city, now they will also be able to subdue the Metropolitan Taxi Institute (IMT), which has already told them not to mention recording customers and that, in any case, the 112 service will be improved and training will be launched by Mossos.
They have met with a senior official of the entity for no more than 15 minutes who has promised them a new meeting of the Security commission for January 20 (three months after the previous one). In an assembly, the taxi drivers present in front of the Barcelona Metropolitan Area building have later decided that if they are not allowed to put cameras on, they will raise mobilizations coinciding with the Mobile World Congress 2022, between February 28 and March 3. Write in your search the words ‘boycott’ and ‘transport’ and they will see that the most important fair of the year has been an infallible magnet for the union struggle.
Debate in plenary
In the municipal plenary session in November, Junts asked the mayor about this issue. The Councilman Jordi Martí brandished the following data for the year: 20 complaints filed by taxi drivers for robbery with violence and another 50 for theft. He defended that 112 “is unreliable and is technically obsolete“and he urged to seek” the legal solution so that, in voluntary way, the taxi drivers who want can install a camera“. The Mayor Ada Colau, who explained that in the last Taxi Safety Commission, no association defended this measure. “All those gathered (police forces, associations and Administration) agreed that it is not a good idea and that the next step is to improve 112 and offer training,” replied the leader of the ‘comuns’, reading the information that would have been passed on to her. from IMT. In conversation with this newspaper. Martí assures that Colau “lied by ensuring that the problem does not exist or that the taxi drivers do not demand the cameras “, and demands that the public entity” do its job “and request a legal opinion from the competent authority so that the taxi can carry a security system already validated both in the subway and on the buses.
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The leader of Elite Taxi, Tito Alvarez, admits that the victimization figures are not higher than in 2019. “But that does not mean that things are not happening,” he adds. He says that there are colleagues who have been assaulted and that they are afraid to return to the taxi and regret that one “political decision“deprives them of” something that has to do with job safety“. In the event that this is a political decision, Álvarez recalls that in Barcelona there are 10,521 licenses and about 13,000 taxi drivers (we must add the employees who exploit another’s vehicle), which implies, he pointed out, some” 30,000 or 40,000 votes. “
Jordi Vilalta, one of the founders of Taxi Companys, confirms that the situation has worsened a lot in recent times, which he attributes, to a large extent, to the “need of thieves to find new victims before the drop in tourism. “Remember that the taxi driver is a person who is very exposed, with his back to a stranger, who works 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.” You have to put a brake on it because it seems that is giving the message that the taxi is an easy target“.
Reference-www.elperiodico.com