You be my Judge! Am I unfair to certain Taxi Company in my Blog?

In my earlier post, Why taxi always not there when we need one? I covered on the various possible reasons of why taxis are always not around when passengers want to flag a taxi.

A guest by the moniker of  had made a comment on the post and this is what the person said:

“What do you think that the cabby spend time and fuel to drive all the way into Tanjong Rhu for? Would mrnewbird or other Smrt drivers perform this charity act when they are nearby Tanjoing Rhu? Without the call charge, he could get a pax in the estate nearby easily after morning peak hour, ie. Old Airport and Kampong Arang.”

@mrnewbird u don’t have to target other cab coy to try to earn a living driving Smrt. and dun smoke gullible commuters with the 1 million people call city/comfort at the same time analogy. that number is more like in a day than at the same moment.”

I would like to make a reply on this and share my views on his comments. This is exactly the sad state of taxi drivers today.

On one hand, some taxi drivers have tons of call bookings while others have to even struggle to get just one. For one taxi driver from Comfort whom I have known, he picks up his customers only through call booking,  and if there isn’t any call booking, he would lost on where to get his passengers. Another taxi driver from the same company with more than 10 years of experience mentioned to me that  he used to wait for call booking until one of the senior driver shared with him that if he simply just wait for call bookings, he is heading for doom. He hail the senior driver’s words and he has been since treating call bookings as a bonus and not a necessity.

For one, refusing to pick up a passenger, the taxi drivers are actually infringing the regulation of LTA (Link). He will be fined $300 along with 6 demerit points under the rule of “Refusing, without reasonable excuse, to hire out taxi or to convey passenger”.

For an experienced driver, one would choose to go to Tg Rhu or Meyer Road after exiting Ford Road via ECP other than other places due to 2 reasons:

1) Shorter empty taxi cruising time 2) higher demand for Taxi in these 2 areas compare to other area nearby.

When there is no call booking, one should pick up a passenger if there is one, thus minimising the empty taxi cruising time.

Quoting from my personal experience, an example would be waiting for call at the taxi stop behind “The Sail”, due to lack of customers, there is lots of taxis driving around. There was a time when I took a passenger and came back to the same place 10 minutes later, he was still there.

The moral of the story is, don’t overly depend on call booking only for taxi drivers especially the new ones.

In my earlier post, I had mentioned that Single Booking System is the way to go. The advantages are as follows:

i) Commuters just need to call a common line that dispatch the booking to all taxi in the surrounding area. This will save the trouble for commuters to call different companies at the same time.

ii) With Single Booking system, drivers do not necessary need to go to a certain companies to ensure job availability to them, thus there won’t be any monopoly by certain taxi companies. This will create a competition among taxi companies to hold-on to the driver (thus giving them better benefit to retain them), lowering down the daily taxi rental.

iii) Taxi Drivers will no longer think that they definitely will have call bookings for them when they reach a destination. Thus more motivated to pick up passenger on the street.

Lastly, my personal rebuttal:

I do not need to target other coy earn a living driving SMRT. For those who know me, especially Taxi Drivers, knows that I earn a pretty decent money, on top of that, advising other new drivers on how to ply the trade with integrity.

All taxi coys have their good and bad. I do not target them unfairly, rather I’m just speaking out what I feel that can help the commuters. If you had follow my blogs, you should have read that I have ask commuters to call not just SMRT taxis but other taxi coy like Trans-Cab as well.

Analogy is always analogy, it’s up to people to believe it or not until they give it a try. If you took offence to it, I’m sorry, but I’m just speaking out from my personal experience.

I’s up to people to judge if I’m getting personal on this issue or I’m just speaking out to help them.