Paying extra charge: as a disabled taxi passenger:

Dee78

Hello all, 
Any advice please, gratefully accepted! Sorry for the long story!😩
I am going a bit mad as a disabled taxi passenger who has a Blue Badge but cannot drive: I am having to pay an extra £2 to access ZEZ zones, in taxis which are my form of mobility transport. 

I have a disability that limits my mobility. I live in Oxford. I rely a lot on private hire taxis which I am able to access ( as opposed to the black 'hackney' cabs) as they are cheaper and more efficient and available. 

Oxford has been for over a year trialling ZEZ zones: zero emission zones. They are only doing it on a few streets, but hope to roll it out to most of the centre. This could take a while..

If you are not an electric car, you have to pay a charge to enter these streets, unless you are a black cab or some other exemptions, eg are in a car with a Blue Badge that has been pre-registered with the council ( only 2 cars allowed) So it is not possible at all to register my  Blue Badge with a private hire taxi for one journey. 

Most able bodied people will just ask the taxi to stop before the ZEZ street and they will walk, I don’t have that option. So until ZEZ is in the whole city centre, the taxis at present hardly go into the limited ZEZ streets, and therefore understandably when a customer does want to go, have to pass on the £2 ZEZ charge to the customer.

😡 I’m sooo frustrated!!! It’s not the taxi firms fault. I have been wisely trying to negotiate with the council, explaining during this very long ZEZ trial period, you can’t disadvantage disabled people and limit them accessing the city centre due to higher taxi costs. They are trying their best, and have listened but have not yet come up with a solution.

I advised that if  they cannot afford some new tech or app that allows disabled blue badge owning taxi passengers to temporarily link their badge to the taxi, they must waive the fee on all private hire vehicles entering ZEZ streets so as not to disadvantage disabled taxi passengers  . Otherwise this is an issue with the Equality Act? 

Any ideas what to do next? I am all for environmental measures, but not done in such a way or on the cheap, that unfairly disadvantages disabled people without providing solutions. 

Thanks for listening 🙏☺️

Albus_Scope

Hey there @Dee78, I can see no one was able to offer any advice here, sometimes it happens due to business and posts can get missed.  So I thought I'd say hi to give your post a little boost.  

How are you getting on with your talks with the council? Any other routes to resolve this issue?