Last week, I used the taxi service in Johor Bahru from City Square to Taman Perling, roughly 13.6 km, for which I was charged RM26. The return trip on a Grab car cost only RM19.
Just recently, the Big Blue cabbies were in the news after they threatened to hold a protest if the government failed to make it mandatory for e-hailing drivers to obtain Public Service Vehicle (PSV) licences.
Another incident goes back to October when a group of 10 taxi drivers shouted uncharitable words and walked out of the room in a show of dissatisfaction towards Grab e-hailing service, during a meeting with Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad in Langkawi.
It was recently reported that Lanang MP Alice Lau was fleeced by a taxi driver, who charged her RM79 for a 4.65-km trip. The ride from the Parliament building to Bukit Bintang in Kuala Lumpur should have cost RM20.
Lau, who is from Sarawak and was unfamiliar with KL roads, said that the taxi driver took two hours to get her to the destination.
These are just a handful of examples out of an enormous number of reported and unreported cases involving taxi drivers.
And such news items are not a rarity considering that little has been done to solve the issues plaguing taxi drivers over the years.
Taxi drivers generally fall into the bottom 40% segment of the Malaysian population, known as the B40 category. B40 refers to households earning less than RM3,000 per month.
The benchmark RM3,000 is the median household income for the B40 segment, according to the Department of Statistics.
This could very well be the reason why taxi drivers have resorted to overcharging their passengers to rake in more money.
However, there is more to the issues surrounding taxi drivers and taxi industry.
LondonCabs.co.uk, a British comparison site, recently declared Malaysian taxi drivers as the worst in the world. A number of factors including language constraints, credibility, the attitude of the taxi drivers, and taxi fares, were the major reasons why our cab drivers were the worst.
A Facebook user, Sweezy Hirano, said: “Looking for good cabbies in KL is simply like finding a needle in haystacks. Good cabbies are like endangered species already.”
Such negative comments are not based on mere perceptions and are real.
A survey of 200-odd respondents, comprising expatriates from 30 countries, by The Expat magazine, gave the Malaysian taxi service a big thumbs down when compared with cab services in 22 other countries.
The respondents even go on to brand local cabbies “a national disgrace”, “a source of national shame” and “a serious threat to tourists – rude bullies and extortionists”.
Taxi drivers have blamed e-hailing services such as Grab and Uber for the dip in their incomes. Ask any ordinary man on the street, the immediate comment about taxi drivers could be “overcharge, rude, and detour”.
Cab drivers overcharging their passengers is not an isolated Malaysian case only. In research by a team of economists, who studied the moral hazards of taxi drivers in the capital city of Greece, Athens, where researchers took 400 rides on 11 different routes in the Greek capital, the findings pointed out that the passengers were 17% more likely to be overcharged on their trips.
However, the sorry state the taxi drivers find themselves in today is by no means an outcome of pressure exerted by e-hailing services or lack of the government’s assistance or support etc. The taxi industry is in dire need of a complete revamp, involving all of its stakeholders.
The general consensus among the public is that the taxi drivers are over-charging and detouring to rake in more money for themselves. Besides this, the attitude of taxi drivers is of concern too. They refuse to take passengers who don’t want to pay a higher and overcharged fare that they quote.
My personal experience says the issue is not of the affordability here. Most passengers, I believe, hold onto the principle that the bills must be justifiable and passengers want to know what they are paying for and why they pay for it.
In most cases, when taxi drivers refuse to use the meter and quote sky-rocketing fares, it only means that they are doing it without justifiable reasons.
The recent call by the Ministry of Transport (MOT) to the traditional taxi drivers to adopt the e-hailing app and services to attract more customers is the right move.
Taxi drivers should ask themselves: “Why are all the customers running away from the traditional taxi services?”
The answers are plain simple: “E-hailing services are more convenient, efficient, seamless, cost-effective, on-time most of the time, and door-to-door.”
From my informal chat with Grab drivers on a few rides recently, e-hailing drivers are subjected to a set of stringent rules. For example, they must not be rude to passengers, always greet and welcome the passengers when they board the cars, must not drive recklessly and dangerously, as well as subjecting themselves to a performance rating to be assessed by customers.
In fact, Grab will release a weekly drivers’ KPI and performance report to all drivers. The report includes things like the number of times the drivers pressed the emergency brakes suddenly or cancelled customers’ bookings, etc.
Drivers would be suspended for a week if the number of customers’ bookings cancellation effected by them exceeded 3 times a week.
Instead of blaming others, traditional taxi drivers should introspect, improve their services and adopt technology in order to survive in this competitive environment.
Test flights of a driverless hover-taxi are poised to kick off next year in Singapore, the latest innovation of its kind to attempt to offer relief from South East Asia’s behemoth and unbearable traffic jams.
Are taxi drivers willing to get killed off slowly in this new ball game or adapt to the changing landscape?
Tan Chee Kong is an FMT reader.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.