Transport | Chronic dissatisfaction likely to clash with fare hike demands

The taxi industry was once more in the spotlight during this week’s TDM Forum talk show.

While Macau Taxi Drivers Mutual Association president, Kuok Leong Son, was calling for a fare increase to “cover the [industry’s] high operating costs,” lawmaker Song Pek Kei remarked that such a proposal is likely to provoke the population, who on the whole feel a sense of  “chronic dissatisfaction with taxi services” to actively oppose a price hike.

Instead, Song proposed a change in the bidding mechanism for the licenses of the regular taxis- this change would lower the currently-high costs of acquiring a taxi license and in turn the license cost would have less effect over the monthly income of the drivers.

“The bidding mechanism needs to be adjusted so the cost of running a regular taxi wouldn’t need to be so high,” she said in her interjection, adding that “[taxi drivers] need to get MOP 2 million to bid [for] a taxi [license].”

A member of the talk show’s audience questioned the specification of new “on-call” taxis as a “residents only” service, asking, “is it really a good thing to specify special taxis for residents only?” The man added that “the [system] shouldn’t be like this. Both visitors and residents have the right to use any kind of taxis.”

In reply, Kuok noted that the differentiation between normal and special taxis is helpful for the residents since “special taxis are able to provide services for residents, which is what [residents have complained that] regular taxis couldn’t do.” Kuok recalled the recurring example; if regular taxis drop off passengers at the Border Gate, they must wait in line at the same place to get new customers who “most probably will end up [their trips] in Cotai casinos.” This closed loop prevents people living in old town and residential areas from accessing the taxi system.

During the show, the former general director of the Vang Iek Radio Taxi Company Ltd, Fong Nim Seong, commented on how the business status of Macau’s legal app-based taxi hailing service providers is less than ideal.

Fong said that each taxi needs to make 30 to 50 trips per day if it expects to cover its costs.

Currently, there are 50 taxis run by the Companhia de Servicos de Rádio Táxi Macau. S.A. Fong said that based on his previous statement, this company needs to attend 1,500 requests per day to cover its daily operations costs. However, the company can only successfully serve 800 to 900 trips.

Given these facts, Fong determined that the app-based taxi-hailing service providers in Macau are not contributing significantly to ease Macau’s taxi demand.

Fong also considered that during the next year, Macau’s human resource cost and road conditions will leave the new taxi operators facing a troubled future.

In a reply to the Macau press, the app-based company said that it is facing a problem caused by an imbalance in demand and supply. It also said that they receive a high number of calls for services, although the number of cars do not meet the requirements posed by the number of requests.