Improving taxi service for society and environment

Although taxi drivers work an average of 12.17 hours per day, it reported, they only carry an average of 18 fares and spend about 80 percent of the time driving an empty cab around.

This is indeed a sad state of affairs, but perhaps not for the reason the MOTC thinks. Like most government agencies, it clearly believes the solution lies in bureaucratic intervention. But perhaps the ministry isn't aware Taiwan has a free-market economy, and according to the theories of capitalism, without intervention — usually called regulation in transportation circles — market forces would naturally find a balance between supply and demand.

Taiwan is not alone, of course, in having regulated taxi services. This practice is widespread around the world, usually implemented in the name of increasing safety and improving customer satisfaction. But there are other ways of enforcing safety, and the factor of most importance to most customers is cost. The only clear beneficiaries of regulation are the taxi companies and their drivers, who profit from a closed market, reduced competition and artificially maintained high fares.

If anything, therefore, there is an undersupply not an oversupply of cabs; a situation that arises from the reduction in demand, which is also a result of the artificially high fares. Deregulation, whereby any qualified driver could offer taxi services from and to any location, and at any cost agreed with the passenger, would be the surest way to balance supply and demand.

But such a move would clearly need to be considered carefully, given the potential social and environmental impacts. Having yet more greenhouse-gas-producing vehicles driving round the nation's streets, mostly empty but occasionally occupied, does not necessarily gel with the pressing need to prevent the greatest threat to humankind's continued well-being in the 21st century.

The potential role of taxicabs in the battle against climate change is hotly debated. Some argue that increasing their number will simply increase carbon emissions; others that increasing their number and lowering their fares will encourage private drivers to abandon car and motorbike ownership.

Weaning the nation off private transport use — Taiwan is rapidly approaching having the unenviable figure of having one car or motorbike for every member of its 23-million population — must make walking, cycling and mass transportation its goal. But in the medium term, taxis, a non-mass form of public transportation, can play a key transitional role.

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