New Road Traffic Act leads to 20% drop in cabbies’ takings

As the New Road Traffic Act comes into effect on 1st Feb 2015, many of us cabbies are now suddenly having to come to grips with the reality of this stringent new road laws. If is now an offence to use your hand-held device even if your car is stationary at the red-light. “Any mobile device” has been defined as any hand-held device that can be used for telecommunication so that means no smartphones, tablets, even Bluetooth receivers or smart watches, google glasses! With the new Act, this means no way of using your smartphone or mobile devices at all! Period! Unless u wanna risk a fine of $1,000 and/or up to six months jail for the 1st offence.

So what does this mean for those of us in the already difficult and ultra-competitve taxi industry? Well, for all cabbies, that means no more accepting of taxi-bookings (unless u think that extra $2.30 or $3.30 taxi booking fee is more worthwhile than paying a 1K fine, possible jail time and the usual demerit points system) via usage of any taxi-apps like Grabtaxi, Easy Taxi, Hailo , Uber or whatever else app there is in the market now! So on the average, someone like myself, who normally takes about 40% of my fares via taxi-bookings, this means approximately a loss of some $30 per day or about 20% drop in my daily takings.

Of course. those cabbies under “big-brother” ComfortDelgro & other main Taxi Companies can still “try” to take bookings via their taxi terminals. I say “try” because now the cabbie can no longer risk calling a passenger who is late and vice-versa or even check on location or ask about other details that come with some bookings. Die die, even passengers now will be left stranded as only the very brave cabbies now dare to accept taxi-bookings (Me a coward, so will no longer take any more bookings, Comfort or otherwise!, just not worth the risk).