SINGAPORE: 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.”
Although he has been getting more customers of late due to the increase in transport demand following further relaxation of COVID-19 measures, his income has yet to see an uptick, he said. Statistics from 2019 show that about 34 per cent of those with a TDVL are 60 and above. In contrast, only 8.5 per cent of those with a Private Hire Car Driver's Vocational Licence are above the age of 60, as of 2019.
British daily The Guardian reported in October last year that the tumultuous state of the medallion can be traced back to its artificial inflation. This trend was observed after Grab had entered the Malaysian market in 2012, while the decline was further exacerbated by the pandemic, with drivers leaving the profession as demand for rides fell.
And going by the statistics, it appears that the taxi industry is taking the brunt of this overall drop in demand. "Already, the taxi operators themselves recognise that the street hail market is a sunset part of the business and they have placed more emphasis on their app booking system." For PDVL holders, the proportion of those between 60 and 74 of age was 8.5 per cent, those between 40 to 59 was 47.1 per cent and those between 20 and 39 was 44.4 per cent.The peak fleet size for taxis was in 2014, the same year when ride-hailing company Grab joined the market, with Uber having entered earlier in 2013.
For taxis, the figure dropped from 18,542 in 2019, to 14,359 as of June 2022, about a 22 per cent decline.While vehicle numbers are falling, the number of total rides has remained relatively stable over the last one-and-a-half years.
Source: News Formal (newsformal.com)
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