A lot of ink has been spilled after the president of Taxisram ( now resigned and rightly so) was suspected of having committed a crime of speculation during a taxi service. According to the PSP, the taxi driver charged “a price 4 times higher than the price”.
The arrest was made at the port of Funchal, at the end of a transport service from downtown Funchal, stopping at the Botanical Garden, Câmara de Lobos bay and returning to the city of Funchal, lasting a total of 4 hours. The previous day, another taxi driver was also detained by the PSP on suspicion of committing the same crime.
The PSP Madeira Regional Command has called on tour operators and hotels to widely publicize the regulated tariffs for this type of service in the Region, with a view to informing tourists about the prices charged between the different routes.
Now. We went to see what the Price Convention says that the 800 taxi owners are obliged to comply with. You need to go to the end of the text of the document to realize that there may be an agreement between the taxi driver and the customer. In this case the “rate depends on the duration of the service, which can only be adopted with the customer’s agreement, and is applicable to services on the occasion of weddings, baptisms, funerals, routes agreed in advance and other social and cultural events” .
For the purposes of charging for the hourly service, “ the route begins to be counted at the location where the vehicle to be rented is located; If the user terminates the service outside that location, the return service will be included in the cost of the journey”. In this hourly service rate, the vehicle is immediately identified by the letter P
If so, what the Convention requires is that if the customer pays 20 euros per hour if traveling in a four-passenger vehicle, if it is in vehicles without a badge and standard color the value increases to 24 euros an hour.
This afternoon, António Loreto, president of AITRAM, lamented the “bad image”, with repercussions abroad, that taxi drivers in Madeira are having due to news made public through “the internet and the media”. “This is serious because people end up not having confidence in taxi drivers and think that this is a free-for-all”, he says, criticizing colleagues caught up in the speculation.
“We need to work with honesty, integrity, which these people need because they think they can win at any cost”, urges the leader who has been working as director of AITRAM for a long time.
According to the PSP statement, the arrests took place following inspection actions prompted by complaints from tourists to the PSP. In one of the cases, the taxi driver had just completed a service from Largo das Babosas, in Monte to Jardim Botânico, which took 3 hours to complete the journey and charged triple the price.
In the other case, an inspection at the port of Funchal that had just completed a service from downtown Funchal to Cabo Girão, which took 4 hours to complete and charged 4 times the price. Both taxi drivers were detained and the vehicles were seized. Both were left with identity and residence terms, until it’s know what measures are to be taken.