Rude drivers and filthy taxis: cabbies named and shamed in Macau

Macau's growing taxi problem has given rise to a name-and-shame Facebook page with more than 2,000 members sharing their horror stories.

Andrew Scott, administrator of the Macau Taxi Driver Shame page, released a cabbie blacklist at the start of the month, with a "whitelist" featuring polite and fair drivers. The blacklist has 73 taxi plates; the whitelist has 15.

"I am hoping that we can force the bad guys out of the industry," said Scott, who is in the process of forming an official association. "We are not an anti-taxi group. We want to work with the industry to fix the problem."

In the first half of the year alone, the Macau transport bureau received 1,340 complaints and its inspectors reported 397 taxi offences. But only 169 offenders were fined.

A spokeswoman said 290 cases were still being processed; the remaining 1,278 cases had been closed. She said some complainants were unwilling to pursue their cases.

Scott said rude drivers, filthy taxis and poor driving skills were common complaints on his site, but "fishing" was the problem people were angriest about, where drivers refuse to accept customers who are not willing to pay up to 10 times the metered fare or who are not headed somewhere the driver wants to go.