High and dry in rain

By Russell Bennett
EMERALD IGA supermarket staff say their elderly hills shoppers are being left stranded in the stifling heat and pouring rain – waiting for taxis that never come.
They say they have been forced to give residents and their groceries a lift home after cab company 13CABS left them high and dry.
Former store manager Peter Van Enk said on the occasions that cabs do arrive, some patrons have been forced to wait for up to two hours.
“And sometimes the taxis are sitting just around the corner with no clue where the supermarket is,” he said.
Front end supervisor Karen Devonshire said: “It’s horrible the way 13CABS are doing it now.
“We ring for taxis each day for a lot of our elderly shoppers.
“Luckily we have a hallway out the front they can wait in but half the time the cabs don’t arrive.”
Ms Devonshire has a young adult daughter who doesn’t drive. She said she often worries about how her daughter gets home.
Macclesfield resident Maria Millers even went a step further saying: “the taxi service is vital to me but 13CABS is just laughable”. She said she booked a taxi for an appointment on Friday but it took two hours to arrive.
“I live two-and-a-half kilometres from the bus stop and I have a leg injury and don’t drive,” she said.
“I understand they’re not running a charity but this affects everybody in town.”
Ms Millers said the drivers who do pick her up are not local and do not know the area.
“There’s just nobody locally,” she said.
The latest round of complaints against 13CABS comes just weeks after a group of teens was forced to wait for three hours at Belgrave Train Station for the beleaguered taxi service to send a car.
‘Jenny’, the mother of one of the teens, was unable to pick the group up because she had a broken leg.
She said she put in 18 calls to 13CABS operators from 9pm to midnight on 21 January and was told on each occasion that a cab was on its way.
She now says she is so outraged she will never use 13CABS again.
The Gazette reported in January that residents in Emerald, Cockatoo and Gembrook could expect greater reliability day and night, as the once seven-car Emerald Taxis operation had access to cabs across the 13CABS network.
The company’s chief operating officer Stuart Overell acknowledged the difficulty hills residents had in calling a cab late on a Friday or Saturday night but said: “We’ve got a number of people working around the clock, helping to close that transport gap.”
Mr Overell also said hills residents would not notice any “jarring” changes at Emerald Taxis but did not respond to residents’ latest claims prior to the Gazette’s deadline.