Duel Carriageway
Work began on the Anzac Parade resurfacing on 12 November last year, with a completion date of 24 April this year, so as not to upset the two major commemorative events of Armistice Day and Anzac Day. For months, traffic has been limited to the eastern carriageway, with a line of concrete barriers dividing three [...]
Roundabout routing
I could fill my blog with these. Screenshots of the ridiculous routings that the despatch system GPS advises. This was one afternoon last week, and I was heading along Constitution Avenue (my car indicated by the red circle/black arrow icon) when I got a job, with the pickup point on London Circuit (yellow circle marked [...]
Kapooka cruising
Just when you start thinking that you’ve seen it all, along comes a shift like the last one. Pat the day driver turned up early. I was fresh out of the shower and only partially uniformed, but I heard the dog give a bark, so I went out to chat. Once upon a time my [...]
Rock Taxi
A new city, a new destination, and the first thing I look for outside the airport is the taxi rank. Professional interest, I guess. What sort of cabs do they have here? What’s different about them? What nifty little feature does the cabbie have that I can blog about? There is a free bus service [...]
Happy people
I picked my passenger up from the Kingston rank. She gave her friend a hug and smiled into the cab beside me, giving an address in a nearby suburb in a bright American accent. It was a quick and pleasant late afternoon trip. The weather is mild after some weeks of extreme heat, and Canberra’s [...]
Scum
A report in last week’s paper: A taxi driver signing off for the night was robbed at gunpoint in Lyneham on Tuesday night. The victim was in the car park of a unit complex on Goodchild Street about 10pm when he was bailed up by a man with a handgun wearing a black balaclava. The [...]
My funny valentine
I picked up Kerri in the taxi this evening for a work related dinner. The sun was still high in the western sky at six thirty as we headed down past Russell Offices to go over the lake to the Brassey Hotel. She leaned over and gave me an affectionate squeeze. What a sweetie! Better [...]
All that jazz
If there’s one thing cabdriving has given me, it’s a love of jazz. Experimenting with music in the cab, I soon gave up on commercial radio stations. The ads were too intrusive and the chatter too distracting. Public radio was better, but even the classical radio station with its minimal human presence was sometimes unsatisfactory. [...]
Dusky
We’ve had a cool southerly change after the scorching heat of the past couple of weeks. A welcome treat for we night drivers, trying to get our sleep in before it gets too hot. But the winds have brought in just a hint of haze from the devastating bushfires in Victoria. I stopped on Adelaide [...]
Six in a cab
You get all sorts of bad behaviour at the airport cab rank. We’re not supposed to pick up except from the rank, and then after paying two dollars to go through the boomgate from the cabyard. But sometimes cabbies will slipstream through the boom on the tail of another, or swing in from the airport [...]
