In message , at 21:44:35 on Wed, 18
Jun 2014, JNugent remarked:
[in response to:]
I don't think the same vehicle can be licensed as both a hackney
carriage and hire car.

What need would there be for it?

so they can "pick up" from a rank at the new science park station

Why would the vehicle need to be licensed for private hire for that?

It doesn't, but it needs a hackney licence for the station area
(currently SC).

If the vehicle is licensed as a taxi, it creates no further advantage
for it to be additionally licensed as a PH car.

Very likely, but the "both" was concerned with a PH later getting a
hackney licence.

Hackney carriages can lawfully be used [for private] hirings, whether
within their licensed area or outside it.
There are no circumstances in which a taxi being additionally licensed
for (so-called) private hire conveys advantage to anyone.

Agreed. (Assuming of course that a hackney licence allows you to pick up
outside your area, without a private hire licence for that area).

Only on private hirings.

That's what I meant. These hackney licences seem quite powerful - being
hailed in your home territory plus being able to act as a PH anywhere in
the country without apply for or complying with the local PH licence
criteria.

What (when it's at home) is (the chimera) a "cab not licensed to ply
for hire"?

A minicab. (aka private hire).

A cab is a cab. A private hire car is something else.

The term "minicab" is in popular use. You have to live with that.

isn't it a bit of an imposition for
drivers to have to get themselves licenced so they can pick up from just
one two-hundred yard street in an entire half-a-county?

No.

The law demands more of taxi-drivers than it does of private hire drivers.

They have already complied with those demands to the satisfaction of the
Cambridge City hackney office, it seems churlish to deny them the
ability to be hailed at one specific place 200yds inside South Cambs on
the off-chance that South Cambs has something more stringent in its
hackney rules. If the corresponding rules for PH are anything to go by,
then SC would be *less* demanding than the city.

So people are suggesting solutions to this problem.

Be sure that there is one first. And be sure that the answer ("licence
some cabs under the 1847 Act" isn't quite so obvious.

There are cumbersome solution. We are looking for a simple, common-sense
one. For example, a way to allow the hundreds of City Hackneys to be
able to operate at this new place, which just happens to be a landlocked
island of South Cambs just outside the City (and only accessible by a
road to the City).

If that is the solution, it can only be achieved by a local government
boundary change.

Or put the taxi rank 200yds up the road, and make all the passengers
walk (and take that exact same cab with all its compliance with City
rules). That'll encourage them to travel by train. Not.
--
Roland Perry