Prime Minister, the Hon. Philip Davis recently announced petroleum retailers would receive a profit margin increase. The new margins will be $0.25 for fuel and $0.15 for diesel.

President of the Bahamas Taxi Cab Union, Wesley Ferguson lamented about the rise is fuel and diesel prices while appearing on The Rundown talk show this week.  Ferguson said, “we just got an increase in taxi fares after some seven, eight years and to now be hit with absorbent gas prices that kind of slide the rug from underneath us.  But we hope to revamp and regroup and get some new ideas going and see how we could survive in these hard economic times.  But we’re gonna engage the petroleum companies in a minute to see if we can get a reduction in gas prices for taxi drivers.”

The union president revealed that the union has reached out an electric car companies “to try to get them to import electrical cars that are suitable for taxis.  Because you know the taxi industry now is moving towards larger vehicles, 13-14 seaters and so far there’s a lot of electrical vehicles on the streets of Nassau even I see the government have a whole lot of them but they’re not adaptable for the use of taxi at this time.  So we will have to re-engage them because we engaged them about two years ago  and they had a very aggressive plan, I think it was supposed to be by 2030 they anticipated that we would have been about 80% have electrical cars on the street but that has not yet been realized.  It seems as if they’re not moving in that direction fast enough for us so we’ll have to re-engage them to see if we can get that process going.”

The increased cost of fuel is expected take effect on October 1st.