The Romans were a canny lot, take Ermine Street, its route between London Bridge and Liverpool Street stations (not that either existed) is almost a straight line of less than a mile. Now the City Fathers have designated the route thus:

L/By London Bridge Street
L Borough High Street
R Southwark Street
R & L Thrale Street
R Southwark Bridge Road
F Southwark Bridge
R Upper Thames Street
Forward Byward Street
L Minories
B/L Mansell Street
R Whitechapel High Street
L Osborn Street
F Brick Lane
L Bethnal Green Road
L Shoreditch High Street
F Bishopsgate

Liverpool Street Station on right, which means passengers having to cross a busy road to enter the station. Please cabbies tell me I’m wrong with this route.

More than 124,000 leaked documents disclosed by Mark MacGann, Uber’s former chief lobbyist for Europe has confirmed the ethically questionable practices of how Uber has flouted national laws, duped police, exploited violence against drivers and secretly lobbied governments during its aggressive global expansion.

Over 180 journalists at 40 media outlets have discovered how Uber developed sophisticated methods to thwart law enforcement; undercut established private hire and decimated the London cab market; lobbied George Osborne, Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, who was described as a ‘strong advocate’; and put pressure on governments to rewrite laws to help pave the way for the app-based, gig-economy model of taxi-hailing that has since proliferated across the world.

I do object getting letters from those whom I have never met addressing me by my first name, this especially includes a company trying to flog me their naff product.

Apparently, tax checks on private hire drivers renewing their licenses are said to be killing the Private Hire Vehicle industry. Before the checks started, there were on average 3,500 renewals a month.

The Tax checks are reducing these numbers in their thousands.

1st April started the rot, followed by May and June. Nearly 7,000 fewer Private Hire Vehicles in London alone.

This should be wonderful news to the taxi trade, but it’s gone virtually unheralded. So, why is the take up of The Knowledge at its lowest point for many decades?

A £70,000 vehicle monopoly and a 12 year age limit across the board on the horizon, plus massive road restrictions across the capital, could be a major part of the problem. Oh! And giving up three to five years of your life to get a qualification that might be considered useless.

I honestly do not know what we have to do for drivers to wake up and smell the coffee. Take-up of the Knowledge of London will only improve if the cab trade is an attractive business proposition.

Just ahead of the end-game in New York, NYC yellow taxis are to be offered for hire under the Uber platform. After this surprising move to partner with New York’s finest, the ride-hailing app has struck similar deals in Spain, Germany, Austria, Turkey, South Korea, Hong Kong and Colombia.

Does anyone know what the rate will be if you ehail a taxi under the Uber platform?

Will they undercut the usual fare just to begin and when people get used to it, gradually raise the price?

So what happens to taxi fare rates when they are offered on Uber?

If they receive the Uber rate, will they simply start to respond only to Uber e-hails and will consumers realise they are way worse off?

The way they use surge pricing in London, you can bet your bottom dollar the customer will lose out.

What’s the purpose of a regulated meter and a historic licensing regime, if a third party booking can take you outside the regulations?

Is Uber’s Project Horizon coming to fruition? Make no mistake, this is the way we are being led by corporate greed, and it’s the way the trade is blindly going.

Uber would love taxis to join their platform because the industry would cede power to them. An ad hoc meter would be the logical next step to full deregulation.

Once the meter is undermined, then it’s game over, £70,000 cabs and cabbies might go the way of Victorian lamplighters.