Why it’s so hard to get a taxi in Shanghai?

January 27th, 2011 Filed under English entries, Life

Especially during rush hours of going off work. If it happen to be a rainy Friday, the battle for taxi between inpatient people would escalate into a martial art. Any in many cases, you would see two people rushing towards one stopping taxi and then a quarrel begin. Oh man, come on, be a gentleman. Do not compete with girls, let along quarreling on the street.

Shanghai taxi

I’m on business trip in Shanghai this week. The first day I left office at around 7pm and planned to take a taxi to hotel. However, when I came to the door, there already several people queuing for taxi. I waited for about ten minutes but no empty taxi. Realizing that I would probably had to wait an hour to get a taxi I had to go for subway. Today, when I saw the queue again, I just went directly to the subway.

I don’t know why it’s so difficult to get a taxi. Are there too many people taking taxi or there are too less taxi? A figure show that Beijing had over 60,000 taxi, the most among all cities, while Shanghai ranked second with total number of 50,000. I don’t know whether the situation has changed. If it doesn’t change, I think the root cause could be the number of taxi is in shortage.

On the other hand, Shanghai taxi drivers are more professional than Beijing peers. They follow strict stand to say hello and remind you of your belongings and say goodbye. Beijing drivers are obviously lack of such standard. You’ll find each of them behave on their own style. Some very polite, some very talkative and many of them seems just don’t like you.

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