Residents from the Goodwood and Kensington areas have raised complaints regarding an informal “curbside taxi rank” on the corners of Voortrekker and Jakes Gerwel.
According to IOL, the City responded to these complaints by saying that the Transport Enforcement Unit has been deployed 16 times to the Goodwood area since November last year, while more than 3 000 fines have been issued and 124 vehicles impounded with no success.
On the other hand, Mandla Hermanus, general secretary of Cape Amalgamated Taxi Association (Cata) said that more taxi ranks were needed to ensure sufficient space for taxis to operate from.
He described these informal taxi ranks as a “common thing”, adding that “Ranks are very few and far in between. There is one at Bellville and Parow, then there are no other ranks along Voortrekker, so there is no space to park and that is the challenge.”
“Then the ranks here are always close to the railway station and the stations are not closer to the main road where your commuters are.
“Also rail is totally dysfunctional so there are no people at the train station. Then there is also the winter rain… taxis want to be close to where their customers are.
“The current ranks are no longer useful. When they were designed they didn’t take into account population growth, there are more taxis now 10 years later,” he added.
Meanwhile, as IOL reports, Congress of Democratic Taxi Association (Codeta) spokesperson Andile Khanyi said that they were not in support of unlawful parking.
“Those taxis do not belong to us. We do not support illegal parking. You cannot just park where you want to park; it makes it harder for another vehicle driving and sometimes it is a private property. It is wrong and we cannot use the impact of Covid-19 to justify that,” he said.
In the same vein, Gershwin Geyer, the public relations officer for the South African National Taxi Council (Santaco) in the Western Cape, said that: “There was a notice that came from the registrar of taxis about illegal ranks going up everywhere. This is the work of law enforcement and the registrar to see that it does not happen.”
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