Is This The Answer to Our Taxis Woes?
By introducing more surcharges or raising flag down fare of cabs. This seems to be the only workable solution that was proposed by the MP whenever Singaporean had problems with disappearing Taxis.
Why I disagree with the MP on the new taxi surcharge. Let us look at what sort of charges we had in Singapore from the time we flag down a taxi till we alight?
- Metered Fare
- Public Holiday Surcharge
- City Area Surcharge
- Bookings
- Peak Period Surcharge
- Late Night Surcharge
- Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) Surcharge
- Location Surcharge
All this surcharges were there so as to ensure our taxis would not pull the disappearing act on commuters. But did it actually worked?
To encourage more taxi drivers to work on public holiday, taxi companies imposed a public holiday surcharge of $1. To encourage more taxi to go into CBD area, there was another $1 surcharge. To encourage taxi to start work earlier, there was yet another peak period surcharge. Well as you see, the list went on with more surcharges added to it. I would not be surprised if a fuel surcharge was implemented to help taxi drivers cover the ever raising fuel cost.
So would expanding the location surcharge to include busy area like clubs, pubs, hotels, shopping malls and Raffles Place magically make the taxis appear? Looking at the list of surcharge that was already in place, I dare say that this location surcharge would not make any difference at all. The taxis would still disappear and commuters would still be paying more for making taxis appear.
In fact with all those surcharges, wouldn’t it make more sense to get yourself a car? We would only need to worry about the price of petrol, road tax, ERP and parking charges and our car would not disappear when we needed them most.
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