The Macau Economic and Livelihood Alliance has conducted a survey to discover what many residents and tourists already know: there aren’t enough radio taxis in the city.
Alliance officials addressed a press conference yesterday, saying that a survey of 1,564 people found that 60 percent of respondents felt the number of radio taxis – which must be pre-booked – was “too small.” The survey was conducted between June and September, the Macau Post Daily reports.
The same percentage of respondents felt that there were also too few taxis available for online bookings in general.
[See more: Opinion: Macao can forget about being an international destination until it fixes its taxi problem]
Unlike Hong Kong and the rest of China, Macao does not permit the operation of ride-hailing services such as Uber and Didi. Instead, a fleet of roughly 1,650 taxis, including 300 radio taxis, is all that is available to service a resident population of more than 700,000, which swells by tens of thousands during peak tourism periods.
The situation has led to chronically long waits for taxis and frequent complaints from visitors and locals alike.
In response, the local government has issued hundreds of new taxi licences, but the process of putting new cabs on the streets is a long one, and the expiration of existing licenses means that the net gain to the taxi fleet may not be as great as hoped for.
