Letter to the Editor | ‘Under the current arrangements being a driver is pretty bleak financially’

Dear Editor,

I refer to the article in last Wednesday’s Macau Daily Times entitled “Candidates offer over MOP1 Million for Taxi Licenses”. Some readers may be aware of the 33 page submission the Macau Taxi Passengers Association lodged on 23 September 2014 with the Macau Government’s taxi industry public consultation process. The submission is publicly available on the MTPA’s Facebook group “Macau Taxi Driver Shame”. Sadly, neither the Macau Transport Bureau nor any other branch of the Macau government was polite enough to provide any form of response to our submission.
As part of the submission, we undertook a detailed analysis of the profitability of both owning a taxi and license rented out to drivers and of being a driver who rents such a taxi and license. I will not bore MDT readers with the exact numbers, which are detailed in our submission for those interested enough to look. But suffice to say that under the current arrangements being a driver is pretty bleak financially. If drivers strictly adhere to the law and never engage in the outrageous, and formerly commonplace, practice of fishing (which no longer needs defining) then a driver is looking at earning less than MOP10,000 a month for what is a pretty thankless task. And that’s working 12 hours per day, 6 days per week! This is why Macau taxi drivers are so incentivized to go on fishing expeditions.
So what is the solution? Well, many things, but part of it is simple – only issue taxi licenses to legitimate bona fide taxi drivers who work a minimum of 48 hours per week and allow the drivers to pay for their licenses in affordable monthly installments, say over five years. This way the taxi drivers can make a decent living wage without breaking the law and it removes the speculators from the industry. The speculators simply drive the cost of a license up and create a system that encourages fishing. Let them go buy some shares or property instead – their meddling in the taxi industry harms everyone in Macau!
Of course the system the MTPA proposes would need enforcement, monitoring and regulation to ensure only genuine drivers owned taxi licenses and of course there would have to be an exit-clause for unusual situations, but that doesn’t mean that such a system shouldn’t be implemented.
I commend the PSP and the government for their strong enforcement of the taxi industry so far this year which has dramatically improved the situation – but the job is not yet done. Until we see the new legislation that has been promised for years but never materialized the return of the dastardly and evil practice of fishing hovers menacingly over the great city of Macau. Indeed, in recent weeks we have seen the incidence of fishing start to creep up a little.
We at the MTPA implore the government to finish the job they have started and properly clean up Macau’s taxi industry once and for all.

Regards,
Andrew W Scott
President
Macau Taxi Passengers Association