Every time I take ride of a taxi at Pudong airport to my home in Pudong, the taxi driver will educate me: “Next time, tell them that you are going to Chuansha”.
By “Them”, they mean the taxi dispatcher who happily acting as the bottle neck of the long taxi lines, and the long passengers lines. Every passenger will be asked where they are going before they can get on board a taxi (effectively slows down everything). They will then dispatch the passenger according to how far or near the passenger is to their destination. That means huge difference in taxi fare for the drivers, who have waited in the dark parking lot for few hours. You can imagine how powerful the dispatcher, and why they still insists to take the power at the expense of taxi driver’s time, and the passenger’s time – something similar happened in bigger scale.
So back to the taxi driver who was not lucky enough to have me as passenger, their only hope is by endlessly educate people like me to tell the dispatcher that I am going to Chuansha, a town just a little bit north of Pudong Airport. They are given special waiver to come back to cut into the queue again to get another passenger.
That is an interesting common pound tragedy in gaming theory. By educating their passengers to cheat the system, they are actually not helping themselves, but to make it harder to get more long-distance passenger (when more other taxi drivers pretend to have had a short-distance passenger, like they did).
An unfair system always cultivate dishonest people. This is an example.
I think I don’t understand. Why is the system unfair?
I have to make a correction here.
This is no longer valid, taxi dispatcher has been written a time on the ticket, the ticket is only valid less than 1 hours. In case of return in 1 hour, the driver usually push the taxi too hard (over speed), and it’s dangerous for the passenger.
If you do want to be fair on that, take maglev! And grab a cab as fast as you can ;)
It seems that there’s a suboptimal taxi distribution. At 8 am, impossible to get a taxi. But apparently at PVG, many taxis. Also at night there’s often a lot of taxis. I wonder what percentage of taxis are on the road at 8 am. If it’s 100%, then I guess there’s not much to do about it other than add taxis. But if not, I wonder why a taxi driver wouldn’t be on the road at 8 am.
@ddjiiii, the unfair part of this system is, the dispatch is not random based (not the best solution, but it is hard to find a better one), it is based on the dispatcher. If the dispatcher can control how much the taxi driver get, it provides a big room for corruption – although it is the smallest possible corruption possible.
@Gene, I agree with you. If you tell them that you are going to Chuansha, it is for sure that they will run at 140 km/hour or higher, 80% – 100% over speed to get back on time. Risky.
@TianQin, that is another problem with the current system. With monoploy and full time taxi driver system, there are fixed amount of taxi. In the morning and other rush hours, the demand is so high, but in other time, the demand is low. The current approach is, control the number of taxi so the taxi drivers can get paid (the taxi company, to be more exact) at the cost of lacking taxi in the morning.
From PVG to my how cost about a little over 100 rmb. I used to think that it is a big amount for the texi drivers, until I met several very rude texi drivers and finally one of them educated me. It made my trip from PVG home very uncomfortable. I don’t want to lie to the dispatcher. I feel bad for not lieing to the dispatcher. The drivers are rude to me. I can’t be angry at the drivers. They usually waited for several hours before getting my 100 rmb. Since then I am avoiding taking taxis from PVG as long as my wife agrees to pick me up. I tried my best to pick up all the friends and relatives from PVG to my home. It created a lot of efficiency but avoided a lot of bad feelings at the same time.
When I lived in Zhangjiang I was also asked to do this many times but I did not agree with it. However I wish they had the short ride system at Hongqiao Airport because I am now living a 30rmb ride from that airport and often arrive after the metro has stopped running. Every time the taxi drivers are angry at me and often drive aggressively because of their anger.
classic gaming the system, control the supply of a pool of commodities and you’re the big boss