For the past 2 days since the taxi fare hike, we have been bombarded with news on a decrease in call booking for cabs, an increase in waiting time for a passenger, long queues of cabs at the airport and taxi stands etc.

I must say a great Thank You to everyone who has contributed to telling the PTC and these blood sucking cab operators how we really felt about the new fare structure. Let’s keep this up for more than just the usual 2 weeks and keep it going until the jumble of surcharges (other than the midnight and airport ones) are completely removed. And for those of you who felt sorry for their predicament, let’s not stop just yet. Remember, we are commuters, not a charity.

After all, these blasted operators will never wake up until their bottom line is hurt and the only way to hurt their bottom line, unfortunately, will be to drive some cabbies out of the trade by making life really, really hard for them. Above which, if some cabbies leave the trade it would sort of justify the new fare structure in terms of supply and demand. In other words, this is just business.

And if you still can’t help but feel sorry for the cabbies, don’t forget that as long as cabbies do not change their attitude in treating passengers, you need feel no remorse in seeing some of them hurting at all. It’s simply a well deserved retribution. Above which, there will be more good years for the cabbies when F1 and the IRs are here next year. In no time, the demand will return, or do you doubt the helicopter vision of our million dollar mini$ter$?

So, once enough cabbies are out of the trade, the choice would either be to continue raising the fare and drive more cabbies out of the trade, or these blasted operators will have to rethink their business model. I doubt they’ll care about the cabbies and they will just continue to squeeze them and commuters. After all, they think they have nothing to lose by forcing us onto the trains and buses

The public transport operators thinks that will be the end of story by driving us onto their buses and trains. But should we suffer in silence? Of course not. We should not stop at hurting this operators just at the cab level alone. Not only should we increase the heat on the cabbies by making them work hard for their money, we should step up our complaints regarding ‘elastic time’ intervals, long wait of buses, bus bunching etc.

Let us all report every single instance of such ‘outrages’ on STOMP, on the ridiculously trivial Stooge Time Forum and Voices on Today, and on our blogs to make the noise deafening enough that no one will believe the PTC and the Tali-PAP’s justifications to raise fares every year. When was the performance matrix ever met anyway, and every year they expect to squeeze us for some more?! LAN CHEOW, understand?!

Come on, Singapore. We can work together to do something about this ridiculous system. And let us not be swayed by all that comparisons with transport systems with other parts of the world. This is our system and when it does not live up to our expectations, it really doesn’t fxxking matter if it beats the expectation of Ravi from Mumbai or James Mok from Hong Kong!!

It’s time we fight back and hurt these transport operators in anyway and as best we could. When they raise our fares, we raise our expectations. When they do not meet our expectations, we raise a ruckus until they address our demands.

It’s not easy for any of us to make our money. There is no reason for us to give it to them that easily.