Open Letter To SMRT TaxiShare

SMRT Corporation,                                                   Dated 28/9/2017

251, North Bridge Road,

Singapore 179102.

To: Mr.Tony Heng Yew Teck

      Managing Director,

      Taxi & Private Hire Service,

Dear Sir,

Re : Appeal for a Reduction in SMRT TaxiShare Rental Rates

I am writing to you Sir, to earnestly appeal for a reduction of the taxi rental rates under your SMRT TaxiShare scheme.

Besides being a regular customer, I enthusiastically encourage my taxi buddies to join your awesome scheme which provides flexible driving hours. 

I salute you on your ingenious and extremely popular taxi sharing scheme(Link) which has recruited numerous taxi drivers and has helped SMRT reduced her returned taxis volume, which is like a volcano waiting for the catastrophic eruption. 

Regrettably, SMRT has arbitrarily increased the rental rate within a short period after the scheme inception. In May 2017, the hourly rate was $5.55 from 7am to 5pm. Now, the hourly rate is $6.80 for the same period...an increase of about 22.5% after 5 months and without sound justification, Your steep rental increase has burdened my buddies and me with higher running cost and made your scheme less attractive.

I hope SMRT is not killing the goose that lays the golden egg..an unwise action motivated by greed.

Nowadays, taxi drivers face immense competitions on the road. Apart from competing with a colossal number of Uber/Grab private-hire cars for booking jobs, we had to race with other taxi drivers from Transcab, ComfortDelgro, Premier for street-hail rides, which are sadly few, to begin with. Therefore, to earn a decent daily income, we have to drive longer hours, inevitably resulting in higher rental and fuel costs.

As you know, many taxi drivers had jumped ship to join the Uber/Grab as private hire car driver but not us. We are professional full-time taxi drivers, not inactive vocational taxi licence holders, retired or retiring drivers and are committed with SMRT to battle the private-hire car drivers, come what may.   

At this tough time, I hope SMRT could help comrades like us to lower our operating costs such as reducing the rental rates, improve incentives, consider share taxi ownership or any scheme that’s a win-win for SMRT and Drivers.

With improved conditions for the drivers, SMRT and drivers can surely overcome any obstacles that come our way, keeping the taxi battleship afloat together.

Yours sincerely,

James Lim

UPDATE:

Today (2nd Oct 2017), SMRT TaxiShare just HIKED the rental rates again from $61.20 to $67.20  for 9 hours booking from 7am to 4pm (an increase of 9.8% ). In another word, the average rate per hour is $7.47 (previously $6.80/hour).

Instead of helping drivers mitigate their burden, they deliberately raised our loads. Why?, Why are they driving us away from them to join other operators or telling us to look elsewhere for another job. 

I wonder how those fucktards at the top think. Those idiots will surely sink SMRT like NOL sooner than later. The day will surely come.