A last-ditch effort by the Opposition to stall the passing of the GPS bill was unsuccessful by three votes in the House of Assembly yesterday.

In a dramatic turn of events, Opposition Leader Grant Gibbons put forward a motion to say the Motor Car Amendment Act 2005 should be read a second time in six months.

However, Speaker Stanley Lowe said the motion should have been made at the start of the debate which had been raging for three hours.

"In that case I would like to put forward another motion, Mr. Speaker, that the bill be committed to a Select Committee of the House," Dr. Gibbons said.

As the politicians filled the House in preparation for the vote, Opposition House Leader John Barritt said a member of the Government "has interest and should not be able to vote".

As a result of owning interest in taxis, Government MP George Scott was ordered by the Speaker not to vote.

Several members of the Government were absent and did not vote including Premier Alex Scott, backbencher Dennis Lister, Government Whip Ottiwell Simmons, Deputy Speaker Jennifer Smith and backbencher Renee Webb.

On the Opposition side Cole Simons, Jon Brunson and Maxwell Burgess were also absent.

Opposition Senate Leader Kim Swan was in the House as was Government Senate Leader Larry Mussenden.

Government defeated the motion with 14 votes to the Opposition's 11.

They then passed the GPS bill which will force taxi drivers to install Global Positioning Systems (GPS) in their cabs.

With the Senate unable to delay the bill for more than a month, it should be signed into law within weeks although drivers will have six months to install the devices before they face fines.

Cabbies who haven't already taken up the offer of a 50 percent break on installation costs can get a 25 percent break if they sign up before July 31.

Finally ending his three-year fight to bring in the technology, Transport and Tourism Minister Ewart Brown said GPS, which had been twice rejected by the Senate, would improve efficiency and stop taxi drivers from wasting gas looking for jobs.

Introducing the Motor Car Amendment Act 2005 in yesterday's special house sitting, Dr. Brown said customers will have to give their location just once before it is logged onto a computer system to be pulled up on subsequent calls.

He said the manual system of dispatching led to bottlenecks with calls taken down longhand and then given out to the dispatcher who calls out jobs one at a time over the radio.

"She then waits for taxis to respond to the job offers and makes her best guess as to which driver should be assigned to pick up the customer," he said. "This dispatcher then moves on to the next job. This, Mr. Speaker, in 2005.

"When it is busy, it may take your ticket 15 minutes or more just to get to the front of the line and be broadcast to the taxi fleet.

"This is the real bottleneck in the taxi industry."

Under the new system a dispatcher will take a call, confirm the customer's location and dispatch the nearest taxi in seconds.

"There are a large number of potential customers who have lost faith in the taxi industry and will find a way to get to their destination without using a taxi," Dr. Brown said.

"If we can restore their faith, we can grow the customer base rather than simply slicing the pie into smaller and smaller slivers."

GPS will also eliminate the need for people to leave their homes to stand by roadsides waiting for passing cabs, said , and will stop fares being taken by other drivers.

Dr. Brown repeated he had no personal interest in any of the GPS companies and would not profit personally from the passage of the bill.

But he said from the beginning he had tried to convince the dispatching companies and drivers to come together to share the profits.

Government wasn't trying to put a spy in the cabs and monitor them 24/7 by putting in GPS, he said, although he conceded it would give data to help regulate the industry.

"As the Minister responsible for Transport I cannot say how many taxis are on the road and available to the public. That must change."

He said he kept hearing if taxis circulated more the problems would be solved.

"I would have thought the objective would be to travel the fewest number of miles without a paying passenger. If I were a taxi driver, my objective would be to drop off my passenger and as quickly as possible, pick up another passenger. I wouldn't want to circulate. I would be happy to travel in small circles as long as I had a passenger in the back seat.

"With the recent increases in the cost of fuel, taxi drivers must operate far more economically. Some drivers are using $60 worth of fuel a day."

He said he kept hearing about drivers who knew where to find work, at cruise ships, hotels and the Airport. "But what about the locals who want to take a taxi?

"Drivers know where they have historically gone to find work but currently they have no way of knowing where customers are waiting to find a taxi.

"Digital dispatch allows the driver to look at different zones of the Island and see how many taxis are in that zone."

He said he had gone to the Airport for 8.30 a.m. meetings and seen up to ten taxis waiting for the first flight at 10.20 a.m.

"I am sure that one of those drivers will complain that he had to wait at the Airport for three hours for his first job and all he got was a trip to Grotto Bay. That is not working your taxi, Mr. Speaker, that is having a hobby. What we want to do is move away from having taxis used as hobbies."

The GPS component will be able to locate the taxi closest to the customer and track a taxi driver in trouble, he said.

Taxis would be fitted with a radio to allow the driver to talk to the dispatcher and a mobile data terminal (MDT) to tell a driver they have an offer of a fare.

The MDT will allow the dispatcher to message every taxi and allow the driver to check the number of taxis elsewhere.

"In addition the driver will be able to see where customers may be waiting for a taxi."

The cabs will also have a covert alarm button with the GPS which will broadcast the location of the taxi in distress to the dispatcher and all the other cabs.

"Using this information the Police and other taxi drivers can respond quickly to a driver in distress." questioned why Government had arranged a special session in the House for legislation which had been knocking about for years. "What is so special about this one topic that it jumps ahead of housing and crime?" he asked.

Taxi drivers lost trust in Government's motives because it abolished the taxi advisory committee with the Minister then giving the impression the BIU taxi coop would take its place, he said.

Drivers had been upset by being branded lazy, said Mr. Simmons. "It seemed like there was an orchestrated campaign to besmirch the reputation of the industry."

He said if the technology was so great drivers would have taken it up themselves just as they had done with cell phones.

Cabbies were finding it harder and harder to make a living said Mr. Simmons and did not want to be saddled with the costs of the new technology with no proven guarantee to make money.

The Opposition challenged Government to offer drivers compensation on their outlay if the investment failed to pay off.

Former Transport Minister said he had looked at the system in his time in office and was not convinced it would work. With only 85 drivers already signed up for GPS it was clear the other 515 felt there was something wrong.said taxi drivers had seen a steady decrease in business.

She said it was not a "happy situation" because Government was asking taxis to invest money that might not see a return.

"The public pay nothing to them," she said of taxi drivers. "There are only two public service vehicles ? buses and ferries."said he knew the GPS debate was "fait accompli".

He said the Opposition was not opposed to GPS technology, however, only 85 taxi owners had signed up for Government's 50 percent subsidy. Dr. Brown announced there will be a 25 percent subsidy until the end of July, but Mr. Dodwell asked when it would expire.

Mr. Dodwell conceded that when the Opposition was in Government they did not make radios mandatory which was "not the smartest of things".

He asked how the GPS bill will be enforced. "These guys are smart," he said. "If they don't want to do it, they won't do it."said it was the way the message was delivered, not the message itself that hurt people.

Taxi owners pay $100,000 to $140,000 for a permit, she said. They work 90 hours a week in the peak season from April to October.

However, between November to March, they make far less money.said a year ago GPS was the most controversial issue facing Government, yet only two people on Government benches spoke in support of the bill.

GPS will not force drivers to travel to areas in which they feel unsafe to pick up fares. She asked what the penalties would be for drivers who fail to pick up fares.

"The system is not the panacea for the taxi industry," she said.

In a point of order, Dr. Brown said Government never said GPS was a panacea. "The dispatching companies, hopefully there will be more than one because that will drive down costs, have the ability to determine how may turn downs a driver has in a week."

He said drivers will be called into the company to be questioned about the "turn downs".said Government was no friend to the taxi drivers.

He said, tourism spending was down, pension costs were up and this resulted to a 50 percent reduction in income for taxi drivers since 1998.

Independent Senators voted against the bill in the Senate, he said.

There had been an extraordinary amount of anger and frustration from taxi drivers and the public, he said.

"The Honourable Member Dr. Brown interjected that the Senators were not independent. They would be insulted to hear that. They could not bring themselves to support something that had not been handled properly."