No Waiting

No Waiting
Originally uploaded by wanhashim

Under this big "No Waiting" sign are several taxis waiting for passengers. By definition, taxis cannot wait for passengers but they have to pick up any passengers that are requesting for their service. May be the sign is kind of misleading because the picture on the signage is a Bus and not applicable for taxi. The signage might be right. But still the taxis are still operating illegally by charging passenger not using their meter.

On the contrary, "Hire Car" can wait at certain designated stations waiting for passengers to use their service.

Taxi also needs to use their meter to charge passengers. The fee is based on the number of kilometres travelled. However, if you purchased taxi coupon at designated location such as at the Kuala Lumpur Central taxi counter, the taxi (if they are in the queue), can also accept the payment and will send passenger to the designated destination.

However, all rules are broken here. Taxi drivers are waiting for passengers who are willing to use the taxi service. The taxi drivers usually offer the passenger certain amount of fee for the intended service, usually multiple times the price of using the metered taxi. They also resorted to using touts to lure passengers to use their service.

I had an experienced once where I heard of a taxi driver of offering an intended passenger about RM70 to send him to the nearest hotel. The distance is not that far to the intended hotel. Upon hearing the offer, I had to resort to other mode of transport to go to the other places.

The difficulty is that during peak hour, there is no taxi willing to stop to pick you up and if you are desperate enough to go to certain locations, then you can end up being a victim of these taxi services.

In order to solve this problem, all of the popular areas (such as the Kuala Lumpur City Center, KLCC) need to have taxi counters where passengers can purchase taxi coupon which rates varies based on the destination and also designated taxi queuing areas need to be provided at the vicinity in order for all of the taxis to wait in queue to send passengers.