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Updated Tuesday, November 17, 2009 9:21 am TWN, The China Post news staff

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Improving taxi service for society and environment

The MOTC will need to take a more outside-the-box approach to the issue, however, and taxi firms and drivers will have to play ball rather than dig in their heels on policies aimed at reducing their environmental impact, whether within a regulated or deregulated system.

To reduce the effects of taxis driving around empty for long periods — other studies show figures lower than the 80 percent recorded by the IOT, but still around 60 or 70 percent — the Taipei City Government, for example, has long proposed the establishment of taxi ranks — designated stands where cabs would queue for fares. Although this would not mean the end for taxis — traditional point-to-point services, since they could still be booked by telephone or online, this environmentally-friendly move has and is being stubbornly opposed by taxi drivers who argue that having to use stands would be inconvenient for passengers and drivers. They obviously fail to imagine the levels of inconvenience that are predicted to result from not responding to the threat of climate change, a change that itself results from our increasingly convenience-driven lifestyles.

Other measures would be to require new taxicabs to be hybrid vehicles — which emit one-third to one-half the gas emissions of regular automobiles — and for local and central government agencies to abandon the policy of providing free or subsidized parking spaces and subsidized travel by private vehicle to their employees, but rather require them to travel by mass transportation or taxis.

Getting the general population to shift to using cabs could involve a congestion charge like that of London and other cities, should definitely include restrictions on single-occupancy in cars, might require subsidization of taxis in rural areas, and could even go as far as some form of control of private ownership of cars, like in authoritarian Singapore, which has almost twice the density of taxis than New York and almost three times that of San Francisco.

In short, the MOTC and other government agencies do have a role to play in devising sustainable transportation policies that meet present and future requirements. While free markets operating under purely market-driven forces may be considered to be optimum for economics, and about balancing supply and demand, they will need to be carefully nurtured into learning more about environmental protection and balancing humankind's short-term needs and greed against its long-term survival.

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