Taxi, the tender for double guides and revision of shifts has reopened in Milan

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More white cars on the streets in Milan. This is the immediate consequence of the reopening of the call for 16-hour family collaborations, also known as “double guides” and the revision of service shifts to adequately distribute the taxi offer in the capital which in the post-Covid era had showed all its limits especially during the evening and night hours. The tender was promoted by the Municipality of Milan and will close next week while with the revision of the shifts, Palazzo Marino aims to at least partially cover that part of the request that is not satisfied today. With the increase of family collaborators, they will have to be in possession of the authorization titles, the offer should grow by a few hundred cars on the streets. Currently in the Milan airport area, which includes Linate, Malpensa and Orio al Serio, there are 5,404 white cars in service, of which 4,855 in Milan. To date, there are 394 family collaborations, of which 154 with a single shift (12 hours) and 240 with a supplementary shift of 16 hours. As regards the data on the responses of the Taxi service, reported by the Municipality in a council commission last April, the analysis carried out by the Mobility Department showed that the calls assigned increased by 9% between 2015 and 2018, while the backlogs rose from 6% in 2015 to 14% in 2018, with a maximum average figure of 28%, between 7 and 9 pm on weekdays and 42% between midnight and four in the morning on weekends.

For his part, Franco Lucente, councilor for transport and sustainable mobility of the Lombardy region recalled in a conference: «There is a synergy between the government and the Lombardy region. We will meet taxi drivers and work to give citizens and tourists a better service by decreasing waiting times to promote, also in this case, more sustainable mobility in Milan, but also in Bergamo and Brescia “Capital of Culture 2023” and to all the other Lombard cities».

In 2026 the first flying taxis

While an attempt is made to increase the number of machines in service, in three years there may be the first experimental flights of the eVtol, electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft, which will connect Malpensa airport with Milan. An initiative in view of the Milan – Cortina Olympic Games. The goal is to decongest the city, with flying taxis that «take off and land in the vertiports and reduce emissions, given that they are fully electric vehicles. We asked the Polytechnic for support to study what the potential demand for these vehicles will be» says Claudio Cuccorese, director of Sea Infrastructure Development. The commitment is to «create the first two vertiports by the 2026 Olympics, one at Malpensa and another in center of Milan. There is an obstacle regarding the certification of vehicles – concludes Cuccorese – we want to ensure that safety is comparable to that of commercial aircraft. But we hope that starting from 2026 there will be the first experimental flights”.