Action to curb dangerous driving by private hire taxi drivers by threatening them with the loss of their licences must be applauded.

Everyone has had some kind of bad experience on the roads with drivers cutting them up, jumping lights or whizzing past at speed.

But it's a little unfair, surely, to lay the blame for bad road manners fairly and squarely at the door of the private hire drivers only.

There are very dangerous manoeuvres also carried out by the hackney carriage drivers. Some of them seem to think they are subject to different rules of the road to the rest of us. People regularly see them making illegal U-turns, racing off at the traffic lights and cutting into queuing traffic.

Of course, not all drivers of either the private hire or the hackney carriage variety cause problems, but they all tend to get lumped in with the reckless minority who seem to think they own the road.

Perhaps one of the problems is that although each car is registered and licensed, many of them - especially the hackney carriages in their identical livery - are indistinguishable from each other.

As Councillor Keith Thompson points out, many cabbies drive around with their ID plates attached by bits of string or old shoe laces.

It would be easier to report the bad apples in the barrel and thus weed them out if they were more identifiable.

Perhaps a scheme should be considered where a larger and much easier-to-read numbering system for the side of the doors or the top of the vehicle is introduced.