Tell Them You are Going to Chuansha

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.