Grrr. Not sure how to start this post without the sensation of stress running through my veins all over again.

Due to my work I have to regularly get taxis around Sydney, and I have yet once to actually make it to my destination without any difficulties. Do I just take it for granted that I’m used to taxi drivers who know where they are going? Maybe it’s my British accent that encourages certain taxi drivers to decide to take me on a ‘tourist’ route to get to a meeting? Or perhaps, they genuinely really have no idea on how to get around the city.

Getting lost, not turning up, turning up late, taking the wrong route, refusing to take you, charging for unnecessary tolls, ignoring the directions you give them and most frustratingly refusing to use their GPS when they don’t know where they are going, I am getting used to, and slowly, very slowly accepting. As I have now learned to just relax a little and without being rude still be assertive enough to refuse to pay the full fare. I’ve never had a problem with the driver for doing this. I have received a couple of honest excuses now when drivers have taken the wrong route, most recently after being picked up from our flat and taken the longest possible route to the Sydney Opera House, I was told “Sorry, I thought you were a tourist”.

Now there are many other websites even authoritive newspaper websites which complain about Sydney taxi drivers. But, what has really, really pissed me off to write this post is the dangerous driving I have encountered. Yesterday I had to tell a driver to stop the car, after he was undertaking and breaking the speed limit to jump a set of lights.

Today I have had a taxi driver refuse to get off his mobile phone whilst struggling to keep the car in the same lane when driving. I had asked him several times to get off the phone to which he ignored me, to later laugh and explain that it isn’t dangerous as he knows where the camera are! I mean WTF! I don’t care if he knows where the cameras are, he was driving dangerously and was drifting lanes.

His taxi number was T2113, and his driver number GR4749. So if anyone from the government happens to read this post, I highly recommend that his plates are removed.