Taxis in Hong Kong will speed up reform if Uber and other ride-hailing firms can compete legally

News that the Transport Department’s contribution to the Hong Kong smart city blueprint is an app, HKeMobility, which excludes arrival times for the MTR and major bus companies comes as no surprise. It is also very revealing. For one thing, it shows that Hong Kong’s transport authorities are not very smart.

But this is just the latest in a long line of implementation failures. Whatever happened to the proposed premium taxi scheme which was mooted in a paper to the Legislative Council more than a year ago? The idea was to grant 600 licences, spread evenly among three different operators, to provide an enhanced service at premium prices. The taxi trade liked the idea of higher prices, but saw no need for the new licences. Quelle surprise, as they say in France.

The latest wheeze to stagger out of the transport think tank is a scheme to discipline misbehaving taxi drivers. The proposed demerit point system covers 11 offences, which attract a different number of penalty points according to the deemed seriousness of the conduct. Drivers accruing 15 points in a given period would have their licences suspended.

I have generally good experiences with local taxi drivers, except for the occasional cab smelling strongly of tobacco because the driver was too lazy to get out to smoke a cigarette. But there are undoubtedly many black sheep and this is the umpteenth attempt I have seen over the decades to weed them out. I can confidently predict it will go nowhere, just like all the others. The functional constituency transport sector member of the Legislative Council, Frankie Yick Chi-ming – who relies on taxi trade votes to get elected – has already stated he will oppose the scheme unless it has industry support.