Prime finds taxi-availability bar too high to
negotiate
THE Land Transport Authority's
(LTA's) report card on taxi operators is out.
Three cab companies - Comfort,
CityCab and SMRT - turned up tops by meeting the LTA's
taxi-availability standards. The trio will be allowed to add cabs
to their fleet in the first half of next year.
The taxi-availability
standards took effect in January, and will be raised over three
years.
This year's standards require 70 per cent
of a taxi operator's fleet to ply the roads during peak hours and
clock at least 250km a day.
Comfort, CityCab and SMRT met
the mark for getting a proportion of their taxis on the road during
peak hours.
TransCab and Premier met the
standards for peak periods, but not for periods just outside peak
hours. Meanwhile, Comfort, CityCab and Premier consistently met the
standards for daily mileage.
The smallest operator, Prime,
did not meet the standards for either indicator.
The results were based on the
performance of the six taxi operators during the first nine months
of this year.
Mr Neo Chee Yong, Prime's
deputy general manager, said: "The taxi-availability standards can
be met by the most established taxi operators, but it remains a
challenge to our young company.
"Prime has had the least time
to develop in the industry and we find the standards to be unfairly
onerous."
Such smaller taxi operators
may face an uphill task with the raised standards that will be
implemented next year. For instance, the percentage of taxis
required on the road during peak hours will be increased from 70 to
80 per cent.
Mr Neo is confident that they
will be able to comply with the standards next year, having spent a
substantial amount to modernise their systems. They will also study
fellow operators' policies to better manage taxi hirers and to
achieve the taxi-availability standards stipulated by
LTA.
Currently, Prime has a "limited relief system in
place", where hirers can engage a relief driver for 90 days in a
year.
Ms Tammy Tan, group corporate
communications officer at ComfortDelGro - which runs Comfort and
CityCab - said that the operator will "continue to do our best to
meet and, even, exceed the new standards".
LTA will start imposing fines
on taxi operators' lapse in performance standards only from January
next year. It had earlier announced that it was giving taxi drivers
and companies time to adjust.
The penalty depends on the
fleet size of the operator. The maximum penalty for not meeting each
indicator is $100,000.
