Motril’s taxis are very disgruntled. In fact, whilst I was visiting Santa Ana Hospital I was stuck behind a slow moving convoy of them on my way out.
They are greatly irked by the incursions made by pirate taxis -Argh, Jim, lad! Things are tight, you see – and for whom not, you may well ask? Some of them spend 13 to 14 hours behind the wheel and are lucky to earn 60 euros, 20 euros of which are eaten up by expenses.
The leader of the taxi sector in Motril, Antonio López Jaime, claims that their greatest enemy are taxi drivers from Salobreña and Motril, who bring clients to Motril and then arrange to come back for them later – this is a cardinal sin, it appears – the client should be abandoned to fate, on the off chance of finding a Motril taxi to take them back. Surely, if the client prefers to use the same taxi to return by, that is his or her prerogative? But no, norms indicate that the client’s soul belongs to the taxi sector upon foolishly getting into one of their vehicles.
Pirate taxis from Calahonda allegedly lean fiendishly over their short-wave radios, sneakily listening in to the Motril-taxi waveband, ever ready to pounce, whilst Torrenueva wheeled cads lurk in the Motril industrial estates only to burst out to snap up a client. Is nothing sacred?
What the 30-odd Motril-based taxi drivers want is for the Local Police to do their job and drive the encroachers out… wanton optimism is alive and well one decade into the 21st century, Ladies and Grumblers!
On top of that all – and here I conclude – the obsolete regulations that govern the taxi sector in Motril, which dates back to 1964, makes it obligatory for drivers to have done military service…