Taxi Executive

A few days ago, I heard on the tele that the tourism ministry will be introducing a group of premier taxi service called Taxi Executive in conjunction with Visit Malaysia 2007. The plan is excellent to attract more visitors and to show them we are coutesy people.

However, the execution of this wonderful plan is in doubt. In fact, I'm not sure if it was carefully plan out. In the past, we have seen a few similar taxi services that fell after a while. Why, because there wasn't a proper planning for the poor taxi drivers and no follow up from the authorithies or company that came up with the idea/project. We had the GPRS premier airport taxi services that wasn't well thought and result in a lot of money wastage and unhappy drivers that the government had to interven to resolved the issues. Then we had the yellow taxi premier. The local as well as expats had experiences that the metre of the taxi is running super fast. Can you imagine going from Ampang Point to Semarak costed over RM30 on a not-so=busy traffic hours. Very few people would travel in it too.

I wonder how this taxi executive will work. It's great that they want to kick start with 300 taxis on the streets by 2007. As it is double the charges, is there a survey prior to the launch carried out? Did tourists prefer a double pay taxi ride in the city or standard taxi? How many percent prefers to walk and sight-seeing? How many percent has a family more than 4 travelling together? How many percent willing to pay the price? Where can the tourist call or find taxi excutive service? Will the taxi drivers only rely on passengers who can afford them? What happen to those taxi drivers during low tourist season? How many locals or expats working here would like to use this service at all times? How many percent of tourists visit Malaysia due to the low currency exchange? There are many more questions...

My point is that I don't want to see the 300 taxi drivers have to struggle later to find customers because the people responsible didn't do a proper follow up and planning after 2007. I won't want them to resort to the scene I see daily at KLCC Suria where a bunch of taxi drivers fishing for Middle East and Western tourist with a fixed price. Even the many guards in front of KLCC and a big signboard don't deter them from fishing expensive customers. I won't want to see the taxi executives ending up doing the same thing in famous mat-salleh areas. Everyone is trying to make a living and the fittest and toughest survive.