The mayor of Belize City has been much in the news these past two nights, and the spotlight has been harsh. But, it's not all bad news coming out of City Hall.
When The Belize City Council first launched it's pilot program for the E-Taxis last month, the concept behind the project was to give taxi driver's an opportunity to lease to own the E-vehicles.
For the council the initiative goes hand in hand with their green initiative by reducing the number of taxis that run on fuel, and replacing them with smart vehicles.
But, so far, only 2 taxi drivers have come on board with the project. They are still hopeful that others will join:
Bernard Wagner, Mayor of Belize City:
"We are trying to go into a modern, smart way, utilising innovation and technology to drive the development of the transportation, industry within our city."
"The arrangement we have with the drivers is similar like any other lease agreement would have. Most of the taxi men nowadays, if you don't have a vehicle and you want to get into the taxi business, someone would lease you their car and then you just pay them I believe it's like 65, 70. Some people ask for up to $80 a day. So we the arrangement we have with our drivers is to pay us our $65 a day, Whatever else you make over that is yours."
"Now with the app now that money is going directly into a merchant account for the city. Right, for the city. It is a merchant account. And then we do at the, at our offices, we would do, sort of reconciliation at the end of the day. But at the end of the day, we just require $65 per day from the driver, whether it be via what he collects, manually or what is collected electronically."
"We want this to be taken over by four taxi men in the city. We are we do create opportunities rather than barriers. We want them to own it We want, but we want to see a transformation from the old gas guzzling ice engine vehicles to cleaner, green, small, less pollution type smoother ride for the residents. And the tourist visiting."
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