I read with horror that Seng Han Thong, the MP for Yio Chu Kang SMC and adviser to the six-affiliate Taxi Operators’ Association, has suggested in the latest edition of NTUC This Week an additional surcharge for busy places like clubs, pubs, hotels, shopping malls and Raffles Place.

This is absolute bullshit. Pardon me for being ignorant because all the places in the world I have been to, Kuala Lumpur, Johor Bahru, Taipei, Hsinchu, Shanghai and Hangzhou, none of these places make the passenger (the customer) reward the the taxi driver (the businessman) so that he will willing go where his business is. On top of that, I have about half a dozen friends, colleagues and ex-colleagues from HK, who also said there’s no such thing there.

In other words (and as far as I am concerned), with the exception of the late night surcharges that’s universal, there’s probably no other place on this planet that comes with the following jumble of surcharges on top of the metered fare like Singapore:

And that’s not including the surcharges for boarding a cab in Changi Airport, Changi Airfreight Center, Seletar Airport and the Singapore Expo.

According to Seng, the root cause of soliciting, refusing to pick up passengers and overcharging lay in the pricing mechanism and errant cabbies resorted to such behaviour because demand for taxis exceeded the supply at certain times and places.

Thus ‘only location surcharges can address the problem of balancing the demand and supply of taxi services at specific places and time, while allowing taxis to charge a more affordable rate at other places such as HDB estates and neighborhood shopping malls.’

* Yawn * What else is new? When will the Tali-PAP be capable of coming up with solutions that doesn’t cost any money? Do we need to pay them another couple of millions a year to make it happen?

This is total utter crap, Seng! Aren’t you aware that someone once pointed out that with a total of 45,000 taxis, the taxi per capita in Singapore is way higher than that of Hong Kong? While that may not mean that the supply has exceeded the demand, it would however mean that the supply is not well utilized if passengers continually complain about how difficult it is to get a cab when some cabbies can afford to idle and park their cabs at certain places to tout and refuse to pick up passengers even when approached. Coupled with the fact that some cabbies lamented that they can circle around HDBs estates for more than half an hour without passengers while passengers in the town area languish for almost the same amount of time without a cab, why there can still exists a situation in which ‘demand for taxis exceeded the supply at certain times and places’, needs to be explained! Is it so hard for these cabbies to make their way to town? The argument that the surcharges are paid to alleviate their fuel burden is nonsense because wouldn’t they have wasted as much fuel looking for the almost non-existent customer in the HDB estates?

Like my friend Brian used to say… LAN CHEOW!! And I agree with him because I wonder why should we pay them for their unwillingness to use that fuel to come to town when they should?!

As the fact stands now, in all those others cities named above, none of them have cabbies which showed a lack of hunger for passengers. In fact, never was there an instance where I or my friends would need to call for a cab or wait more than 10 minutes for a cab there. In that case, I ask again, why do we continue to reward cabbies who can actually afford to be picky if life is really so hard for them? In fact, do we have statistics on how many cabbies have dropped out of the trade because they can no longer make a living from it?

But of course, our PAP MPs in their ivory towers would have simply told us that if we are unhappy [bway song] with the taxi service, we can always take the other mode of our so-called World Worst Class public transport like the MRT or the bus and stop whining. To prove their point, the Stooge Times will run articles featuring foreign talents quitters comparing how ‘good’ our transportation system is with that of the country they just quitted from. And the rubber stamp lapdog PTC (Public Transport Council) will always approve what the public transport companies asked for, by citing that they have meet the performance matrix and service standards, which only God Himself would know who wrote them. (Certainly not written by us commuters, right?)

Please, it is time to take a radical approach to deal with the taxi problem. It is time to remove ALL these freaking surcharges once and for all. Perhaps it is time to make our metered fare more on par with international standards so there will be no way for recalcitrant cabbies to try and take advantage from the flaws inherent in the system.

The following is a comparison of daytime cab fares with several other cities at a glance.

So, are our fares really so fxxking cheap that our cabbies are finding it hard to make a living even with all the current surcharges in place, or are they just so kriffing pampered that it’s high time we do away with those blasted surcharges to make them more hungry for passengers? I’ll leave you to decide if our fares are really competitive compared with these cities according to their nation’s respective per capita income, once you factored in all the stupid surcharges we have, of course.