The Nerja, Councillor for Traffic, Inocencia Quintero, announced that she would be working in conjunction with other towns on the Costa del Sol to eliminate “intrusion in the taxi sector.”

To this end she participated in a meeting in Torremolinos, which had been convoked by the Mancomunidad de la Costa del Sol Occidental and the Mancomunidad de Municipios de la Costa del Sol-Axarquía to draw up a protocol and unify municipal bylaws.

She says that this “intrusion” was extremely prejudicial for the sector and gave a bad image of the town. She described the meeting as “productive” and added that more were to come.

But this problem is much more widespread: the Federación Andaluza de Autónomos del Taxi (FAAT), which includes 90% of the sector amongst its members, has been pressuring the Junta to do something about it.

Across the other side of Andalucía in Almería, one taxi driver at the airport complained, “when English tourists come through the gates, you see them climbing into a private car, driven by somebody of the same nationality. They’re called pirate taxis and are the greatest threat to the sector.”

The taxi sector of Almería calculates that it loses 60,000 euros a month to this practice. As an aside, looking at that figure it looks as if it has been adequately calculated, until you translate it into pesetas and come up with a round ten million, which gives an entirely different impression concerning how accurately it was done.

On a national level, the Chairman of the National Union of Taxi Associations, José Luis Funes, says that pirate taxis account for a 22% drop in billing across Spain.

(News: Nerja, Axarquía, Costa del Sol, Malaga, Andalucia)