Taxi is part of people’s life – especially for people with relatively higher income in the city, just as cars are part of people’s like in U.S. Since more people cannot afford or won’t buy a car, taxis are convenient and cheap. Well. It is not as comfort and convenient as a family car, definitely.

Taxi Ticket

All the taxis in Shanghai will give machine-printed receipt. There is some very interesting and useful information on the ticket. If you check any of them, you will find the story behind each of the ticket. Here we go.

Her is a typical ticket – the majority of companies use this kind of ticket. Here is the translation into English:

Car No.       Do V6683

Driver No.     026473

Date       2003-07-08

Depart  (K0970) 16:14

Arrive          16:18

Unit Price   2.00 RMB

Mileage         1.5km

Wait Time    00:01.24

Far         10:00 RMB

Including 

Electricity 0 RMB Toll Fee 0 RMB

The telephone number, customer complain hotline and location of the taxi company are required to print on the header for all tickets.

The Car No. is the license No. for the car which is printed on the car plate.

The Driver’s No. is a 6-digit number assigned to the taxi driver. Any taxi driver can be easily found with this number. It is registered with Shanghai Taxi Administration. So you know the important to get a receipt when you get off – if you want to complain the taxi or lost your belongs on the taxi, just call the taxi company at the telephone number listed in the ticket and give the driver’s No.

Date, Departure and Arrival time are easy to understand.

The Unit Price is the last applied price per km in your journey. Here is the charging model of Shanghai taxi. According to a taxi driver from Nong Gong Shang, this price is not adjusted in the last 10 years.

So you see, there is a Wait Time field in the ticket. It is the time the taxi waits for the red lights or in traffic jam. So remember, when the taxi is waiting, you still have to pay.

Fee is the most important field. It is the money shown on the meter and also the money you need to pay. The fee is calculated using the rules shown above.

I am not sure about what the Electric Adjustment is. For the Toll Fee, it is the fee the taxi driver may pay for you. The only Toll Fee in Shanghai downtown is the 15 RMB on the road exiting Hongqiao Airport. Sometimes, the taxi driver will print it on the taxi ticket in this field, but most times, they just directly give you the original ticket for the toll fee.

Well. Now the only thing left is the K0970. I didn’t know what it means. It is on every taxi ticket. Sometimes, it will be K5820, K0640, but number other than 970 is rare. What is it?

Finally I called the taxi administration and they told me the answer: that is the technical identification for the model of the taxi meter. To be more specific, 970 means when the sensor in the meter get 970 pulse from the wheel, it will count as 1 km.

Above is another kind of the ticket. It has almost exactly the same layout as the first one, the only changes are:

1) The Layout of the Date and Time Field

2) The Taxi Meter Only Print Numbers

Unlike the more advanced dot printed, the old fashioned printer can only print out numbers. So it faces the problem of representing the Car No. which consists both English letter and digits. Do V6683 is an example.

The smart guys there have found out the way to transform the English letters into numbers. The characters can be represented by their ASCII code. A = 65, B = 66….. Let’s take the ticket above as an example.

970-66-783741

==============

|   |  |  |

|   |  |  ==== 3741 = 3741

|   |  ======= 78 = N

|   ========== 66 = B

============== 970, means 970 pulse = 1 km 

Here is the mapping table.

Taxi Fee Calculation Practice

Taking the last ticket as an example, we can see the taxi ticket calculation rule in action.

Car No.   970-66-783741

Driver No.       201010

Date          2003-6-16

Depart/Arrive 8:26-8:54

Unit Price     2.00 RMB

Mileage           3.5km

Wait Time          0:20

Far           19.00 RMB

Here is the calculation. :-)

Basic Fee                      ===> 10 RMB

3.5 km - 3.0 km = 0.5 km       ===>  1 RMB

20 mins * 1 km / 5 mins = 4 km ===>  8 RMB

__________________________________________

Total      19 RMB