Gim Kopi

Last evening, I was at the Singapore General Hospital due to an emergency in the family. Eventually, I stayed up to 11pm before I left. The taxi seemed the only way home, which is located at the north-east of the island. I was just too tired to manage walking out to the MRT since the free internal bus service had stopped its services for the day.

Fortunately the queue wasn't very long, I was the third in line. The place was very quiet and I didn't see many taxis around. I began to worry. What if my wait took me over the hour? Then I would need to pay 1.5 times the usual amount. Somehow, in the quiet of the night, with no taxi in sight, your imagination becomes more vivid. Then a taxi whiz pass. Its 'For Hire' lights were not on, but I looked closely and saw no one in the cab except the driver. Oh well...

Then two women joined the queue just behind me, followed by several others who didn't join the queue. I had a sense of dread. Don't tell me these people are going to spoil my wait and beat the queue by booking for a cab? Whenever people did that, taxis just don't show up at all! I surmise that taxi drivers would be alerted to 'booking' business and would thus have no incentive whatsoever to drive up to any taxi queue until and unless called upon. Fortunately, these people 'cleared out' in private cars that came by to pick them up.

Still no sign of a cab. Then I notice the same cab I had seen whiz by before whiz by again - still with no passenger on board. This time, the two women behind me also noticed this. One of them said, rather sarcastically, that the driver is probably going for his Kopi fix before he would pick up any passenger at midnight. Well, it seemed to me that if that were true, he had been drinking his kopi in his car for a while. I thought this cruising around would have stopped with the skyrocketing price of petrol. It seemed that, whether deserved or not, local taxi drivers have gained a notoreity about 'disappearing just before midnight to reappear miraculously at the stroke of the hour. I just didn't want to believe this would happen to me last night, but the cynicism of these women was telling.

This is nothing new. It's been happening for a long long time. Its just that it almost happened to me last night. No wonder that Singaporeans NEED to own a car, probably for occasions like these. Something has gone very wrong in the way cabbies and taxi operators provide their services. I dare say these errant behaviour can be traced back to the people who set the policies and police the transport industry on this island. It is all a sad state of affairs. In Beijing or Shanghai, I wouldn't have this problem. That this has persisted for so long without a resolution to the problem is a crime.

If this is what a world-class transportation system is shaping up to be, I would rather have none of it. Just give me an honest, hardworking cabby and we can toss the world-class thing out the window.