SINGAPORE, Aug 20 — Having been a taxi driver for 28 years, 63-year-old Anthony Oh was accustomed to the “traditional” means of picking up passengers — either by waiting at taxi stands, or by picking up riders hailing cabs on the street.
He was not comfortable with doing this at first, not because it meant learning a new skill but because he had an axe to grind with these ride hailing companies. While he used to pick up only about seven passengers a day before using the application, he now picks up about 12 passengers a day.“Now I rarely do flag downs, maybe only one to two trips a day will be like that, nowadays 90 per cent of my jobs are from the ... it’s convenient for everybody, both the driver and the passenger.”spoke to were as open as Mr Oh to adapting to new technology. One taxi driver who has shunned away from the ride-hailing applications is Mr Vincent Goh, 60.
As taxi drivers like Mr Goh continue to grapple with falling incomes — amid ever-rising overhead costs, neverending competition from private-hire car services and lingering effects of the pandemic — the future of Singapore’s taxi industry has once again come under the spotlight. According to data from Statistics Singapore and the Land Transport Authority website, the number of taxis here fell by about half between 2014 and 2022. Over the same period, the number of private hire vehicles increased by more than threefold.
Closer to home, Malaysia has also been experiencing a fall in taxi numbers. According to Malaysian daily newspaper, about 70,000 taxis have been abandoned at scrap yards due to the decline in demand for taxi services in the country since 2014, with losses estimated to be around RM2.9 billion. While commuter demand is on the rise currently as the dust slowly settles, it is still firmly below baseline levels that were observed pre-Covid-19, said transport operators.
“It’s a market service that meets a market transport need... As that need evolves, and as street hails continue to decline, then the market model needs to change,” said Assoc Prof Theseira. A driver with ComfortDelGro, who wanted to be known only as Mr Yeo, said that when he first started driving taxis about 12 years ago, the predominant mode of getting cabs was by flagging them down. “Now, it’s different.
Calling it quits was what former taxi driver Andy Guan, 40, did when he saw that his earnings were not increasing even though demand had been higher at the start of this year. “I’m now using an e-bike, and my daily operational cost is probably only S$3 to S$5 of electricity for charging... I don’t need to spend on fuel, daily rental, or think about summons, parking tickets and so on.”
Taxi operators and ride-hailing companies said that they have rolled out several initiatives to help drivers, especially the more senior ones, get up to speed with their applications. — TODAY pic He added that while he had resisted change at first, he found that the apps were easy to use once he got the hang of it.
Even if he were to wait on the roadside, it is hard to find any cabs that are “green”, indicating that they are vacant.Mr Loy said he does not use ride-hailing applications because he is not used to doing so, and has no intention to pick up a new habit. “I normally call for the cab , I don’t use the applications because I don’t understand how to use them,” he said.
And just like some of the older commuters interviewed, Ms Lim said that learning to use ride-hailing apps had never crossed her mind. Agreeing, Associate Professor Raymond Ong, from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the National University of Singapore, said that it is expected that flagdowns will be seeing a “slow death”, especially when more users become used to booking a taxi or private-hire cars through apps.One quick solution is for taxi and ride-hailing companies to provide training for their drivers on how to use their respective ride-hailing applications.
“In recent times, high fuel prices have deterred prospective new drivers from joining the P2P sector,” said Ms Tan. The firm has also rolled out a co-pilot programme that pairs an experienced driver with a new driver. “Drivers themselves also have to be more adept in terms of scouting or waiting for their next customers,” he said. “They also must be open to take on customers who would otherwise be shunned by private-hire apps.”