Macau Matters | More Taxi Commentary

Richard Whitfield

Along with many others, I have previously ranted about the problems with Macau taxis. In my view, we clearly need to move towards a Didi/Uber style taxi booking and payment system, and the sooner the better.

I recently got three teams of undergraduate university students to do street intercept questionnaire studies of the quality of Macau’s taxi services and the results just confirm my thinking. In our survey we had a somewhat disproportionate number of younger respondents, but 238 out of the 300 respondents told us that they had previously used Didi/Uber type systems in other places and 248 of the 300 wanted to see them implemented in Macau. Our respondents were a relatively even mixture of locals, tourists (mostly from China) and non-locals working in Macau.

It totally mystifies me why the Macau government panders to a small number of very mediocre taxi drivers and taxi license owners to stall innovation in taxi services at the expense of the broader local community and our tourists (who are the lifeblood of Macau) that strongly want to see changes.

Everybody hates Uber as a company, but love its taxi booking and payment system and recognize that it is far better than the traditional approach to managing taxi services. If we do not want to let in Uber/Didi, I believe that Macau can develop a similar non-profit open IT platform for connecting customers with service providers. Such a system does not seem that complex to me, and I believe that as well as taxis, other services can be piggy-backed onto the same platform, eg people offering a variety of home maintenance, delivery and handyman services. The open platform just needs mechanisms to show the availability and location of service providers, to review and rank the quality of service providers and customers, to make bookings and arrange payments and to register and certify service providers and customers. The infrastructure needed for the system could be paid for by a government mandated transaction levy.

Requiring service providers to be good-standing members of the Macau community (no criminal record and a good driving record for taxi drivers) and requiring them to complete reasonable service training, and requiring vehicles and other equipment used by service providers to meet good professional standards and to be properly operated, maintained and insured should go a long way to keeping “bad apples” out of the pool of service providers. Clear and transparent service charges, including reasonable peak period price escalation, along with strict enforcement of online payments should largely eliminate service gouging and ensure adequate availability of service providers. Finally, making the platform non-profit gets rid of bad corporate actors like Uber.

The open platform should also shift the emphasis to licensing individual service providers and eliminate the need for taxi licenses and the like. I really have no sympathy for the loss in value of the existing taxi licenses that this entails – current license owners have repeatedly failed to ensure that reasonable services are built on their licenses.

We also all know that fully autonomous taxi services are coming within the next 10+ years, if not much sooner. These services will require an online booking and payment system akin to Uber/Didi. On this point, an architect friend firmly believes autonomous taxi services will arrive quicker than we think and that as a consequence the value of car parking spaces will fall dramatically – who wants to maintain a car if you can get cheap and convenient autonomous taxi services anytime, anywhere?

In Macau we should be facilitating these kinds of lifestyle innovations and not holding them back. As I always say, Macau should be a showcase for the world of the future.