Taxiroute.co.uk: New tool to calculate taxi fares - feedback wanted!

vaio

ifb wrote: »

I think we're getting off topic here (and I'm STILL nothing to do with taxiroute.co.uk btw.....). My posting was objective and I stand by it 100%.

IFB, obviously if you say you are nothing to do with taxiroute.co.uk then I accept that. Other less gullible people might find the fact that the owner of your transport related home page (Ian Brooks) and the owner of taxiroute.co.uk (Trevor Daniel) live at either end of the same street throws doubt on the rest of what you say.

According to taxiroute.co.uk the trip from Ian Brooks’ home (CF64 4DE) to Trevor Daniel’s home (CF40 4AB) is 200 yards and should cost £2.

Bringing this right back on topic this £2 price exposes one of the flaws in taxiroute.co.uk as to make the 200 yard trip between Ian’s and Trevor’s houses a taxi is going to have to drive miles from either Barry, Penarth or Cardiff. If my memory of S Wales taxi drivers is anything to go by you’ll get short shrift if you try and get them to do a 5, 10, 15 or 20 mile round trip for a 200 yard £2 fare.

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trevorjdaniel

Hi,

It's trev from taxiroute.

Firstly, thanks for all the feedback, very useful.

I will try and address some of the issuse that have been raised.

Firstly to get this out in the open, yes, IFB is known to me, he is a friend of mine that lives in the village. But, apart from being a personal friend he has nothing to do with TaxiRoute. IFBs comments were his own personal comments and were not "solicited" by me in any way.

vaio, if i had been told that we weren't connected i would have probably done the same things as you and felt like i needed to prove the point that we were - but did you really have to publish very personal information on this site to do that?

Anyway, can we all be friends again and put this behind us?

Onto your point about the £2 fare. Im not quite sure how to answer this. It's something that occurs all over the country and is not a function of South Wales or any other part of the country and im not sure I can really agree with your point that it's a flaw with TaxiRoute. Yes, you are quite right, when a trip like that comes in over the radio or the data head the drivers are certainly not going to be fighting over the fare but on the other hand, if i rang a local taxi company now i am pretty sure they would take the booking.

The idea of TaxiRoute was and is to be able to give people a guide of what a taxi fare should be. It's never going to be 100% accurate but I reckons it pretty darn close.

Again, and I dont think this is a flaw in TaxiRoute, you will never really be able to get an exact estimate even from the taxi companies as there are lots and lots of real world circumstances that occur. I am just hoping that the system can be used in a way that when you do ring for a quote and want it to be a fixed quote you can use TaxiRoute to give you some idea of whether its a fair quote.

I am continuing to try and improve the system and everyones feedback is much appreciated. As I mentioned in earlier posts, TaxiRoute is not some huge limited company trying to corner the UK taxi market.... It's just me! I wrote the system initially just for myself because I was never sure what I sould be paying. I then thought, why not let others use it and made it into a website.

It just occured to me that this is one of the few trades in the UK where you get to pay whatever it says on the meter without really having anway to be satisfied that it was correct. I thought this might be a nice way to make the customer feel more confident in what they were getting.

Anyway, please keep the feedback coming. It's very useful and I will do my best to act upon it and fix anything I can.

Trev

vaio

trevorjdaniel wrote: »

....... I will try and address some of the issuse that have been raised.

Firstly to get this out in the open, yes, IFB is known to me, he is a friend of mine that lives in the village. But, apart from being a personal friend he has nothing to do with TaxiRoute. IFBs comments were his own personal comments and were not "solicited" by me in any way.

vaio, if i had been told that we weren't connected i would have probably done the same things as you and felt like i needed to prove the point that we were - but did you really have to publish very personal information on this site to do that?

Anyway, can we all be friends again and put this behind us?......

Glad you’ve cleared that up, the “very personal information” you mention is available to anyone via the whois system for domain registration. Also note I only used your postcodes rather than your actual addresses which are also available.

I’m off with flu and bored so what shall I do, watch daytime tv or have a dig into what you are saying which, quite honestly sounds like a pack of lies to me.

I know, have a look on the companies house web site and the whois domain registration site.

Q. Who is taxiroute.co.uk owned by?

A. Trevor Daniel trading as IBBD ltd (I note IBBD ltd was dissolved in March so presumably any value in taxiroute.co.uk will go towards giving the creditors some money back?)

Off to Companies House…..

Q. Who were the directors of IBBD ltd?

A. Trevor Daniel (director & holder of 10% of the shares), Ian Fleming Brooks (director & holder of 36% of the shares). There are other directors/share holders listed but they don’t seem to have posted what a good idea taxiroute.co.uk is (yet.)

So, you say….. “Firstly to get this out in the open, yes, IFB is known to me, he is a friend of mine that lives in the village. But, apart from being a personal friend he has nothing to do with taxiroute.co.uk IFBs comments were his own personal comments and were not "solicited" by me in any way.”

In fact….. taxiroute.co.uk was registered in 2007 by IBBD Ltd which was 36% owned by IFB and 10% owned by you before it was dissolved.

Glad you brought that out in the open and cleared it up.

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Lemonade_Pockets

Oooooooopppppppps this has gone horribly wrong.

Guy's you have a good idea, its a great shame you apparently choose to resort to underhand tactics to sell it.

nomoneytoday

I can ask an Aberdeen Company to do a job in Kent. The software doesn't quite work

trevorjdaniel

Hi,

Thanks for the reply.

Actually, you can't do that. When a route is calculated it only shows taxi companies that are within 20 miles of the starting point of the fare.



Trev

nomoneytoday

trevorjdaniel wrote: »

Hi,

Thanks for the reply.

Actually, you can't do that. When a route is calculated it only shows taxi companies that are within 20 miles of the starting point of the fare.



Trev

If there are no defaults available it gives you a drop down menu of all the areas, regardless of the start and finish destinations. For example the Aberdeen Council taxis charge £32.11 for my task, the Berwick ones look for £30 and Bournemouth cabs charge £59.40

Not bad for a trip to Londonium

trevorjdaniel

Hi nomoneytoday,

Can you tell me the route you are putting in please?

Thanks

Trev

juliescot

Trev - no comments about post #34?

Like vaio I struggle to see how this thread is no more than advertising for a commercial site.

"Our Silver Advertising Option allows you to not only add your company to the Taxi Directory but we also add it to the Fare Calculator. This means that when a passenger enters a start point within 10 miles of your company it will be displayed in the list of recommended taxi companies."

MSE_Jenny

Hi guys

Just to clear things up, MSE isn’t backing the site & this thread isn’t spam. We just thought it sounded like a nice idea in theory and wanted to hear feedback on quotes people got before we looked into it more and considered adding it to one of the guides.

Unfortunately, I don’t think Trevor realised it wasn’t the done thing for people to post about their own companies and now the thread has gone off track.

If we could stick to just reviewing how the site works, that would be fab. We just wanted to know if the quotes were realistic :-)