Electronic eyes are watching over all who ride in a taxi, cabbie and client alike. Some of those eyes are inside the car and some are miles above the earth.
Prince George Taxi's Manager Sam Kuuluvainen explained a list of industry-wide safety measures in response to public concerns expressed in Wednesday's edition of The Citizen over a few taxi drivers who refused to give their DNA samples to the RCMP in a four-victim suite of investigations.
He said few professions have the level of scrutiny that the taxi industry does, regardless of what company you ride with.
The measures exist for the safety of the drivers as well as the passengers.
"We have on-board cameras to film everything that goes on inside the cab," said Kuuluvainen. "It is government regulated. We have no access to the images ourselves, it is all stored securely, and it stores four days worth of images that can be accessed only by the police.
"The night shots are as good as the day shots; it has infrared vision. They are very high quality shots. If anything happened inside a taxi, there would be photos."
The camera takes pictures on a time-interval basis and whenever certain triggers happen like the opening of a door.
"Even more importantly, we have a GPS tracking system that maps the movement of all our taxis in our system, and stores that information," Kuuluvainen said.
"It isn't a guessing game, we know exactly where our cars are and where they have been. That information is kept for 90 days, with GPS precision. I can go back in time and look up exactly which cars went to exactly which places. We work with the RCMP all the time, we always co-operate, and this is the kind of information they find very helpful in their investigations. Our cabs have a better tracking system than the RCMP has for their cars."
They are so sensitive they can even inform authorities, through simple co-ordinate calculations, what speed any given cab was travelling at, should there ever be a crash of an allegation of aggressive driving.
Mohan Singh Kang, President of the B.C. Taxi Association, said the taxi industry couldn't afford to be anything short of exemplary with public safety. All drivers have to undergo an annual criminal record check, many have to be fingerprinted to get their chauffeur's license, those licenses are administered by the police force of the taxi driver's community, and there is overarching legislation that governs the profession.
"There is quite a safety net. We need the confidence of the general public," he told The Citizen.
