A friend of mine told me I must write this down, a story that she had heard from a taxi driver the day she arrive at KLIA airport. She took a taxi and during the way she chat with the taxi driver about his work. The taxi driver mention that each day, he had to pay around rm250 (which is around rm6000-7000 a month) to cover the cost of taxi license rental fee and petrol. After my friend calculation, she found out that he probably need to work more than 10 hours non-stop to break even, remember it is not making profit, just break even.

To make matters worse, for those who are not belong to airport taxi team, he can't pick up any passenger from the airport, he can only set them off from the city to airport. Which mean he would have to go back city in an empty car.

After a long period of suffering and enduring, you are not suprise that the taxi here had build up some law-breaching bad habbits. Take an example, in most taxi hot-spot places(such as shopping mall), you will notice that most taxi will decline to use taxi meter and charged consumer over-price. This is because the taxi meter does not reflect the "taxi license rental fee" which indirectly paid by the consumer at the end.

As you can see, there are mainly two causes of this problem:

First, because the government's "cronies" able to get all the taxi license from JPJ. Those taxi drivers who want to work will have to rent it from the "cronies" that own it. Taxi driver never own a license for their work, in another word, the need not to responsible for their professional. If you understand this, there's no wondering why taxi driver over-charge their fee, and have a bad attitude towards their customers.

Second, some taxi companies and drivers are over protect their business territory. Example KLIA is about an hour from the city. If normal taxi are only allow to drive passenger there and not allow to pick up passenger at airport, they are pretty much wasting their petrol actually, plus the customers have to pay more to go KLIA. All these happen because of selfishness that certain people want to keep their profit high. In some area, taxi that from outside area is forbit to pick up passengers, this over protected act, will only cause our society to loss at the end.

The first ever step to solve the plight of taxi service in Malaysia, is to have fair distribution of taxi license to the public, eliminate the territory protection of taxi driver, and force all taxi drivers must responsible for their license and their professional code of conduct.