Stuart Wolfendale

Look pal, if you’ve done a deal with a taxi driver to pick you up from the airport and take you home for a discounted flat fee with the meter switched off, then be prepared to walk the walk at Chek Lap kok.

You have entered into a pact which breaks the licensed taxi regulations, encourages the fast buck and, though you can’t see beyond getting home to your unit with your feet up in your bunny slippers sipping your cocoa quicker and on the cheap, will lead us all down to a place you will regret.

I don’t know what it is about people like you. You are from the Hong Kong social seam, which once was grateful for air con and a TV and now wants to live like a banker. You demand a live-in servant. You cannot afford to do that properly , of course, so you recruit a woman from a nearby peasant society, accommodate her in a broom cupboard or on the kitchen table and pay her in dolly mixtures. Now you want to travel home in an air conditioned, chauffeur driven three litre motor car over 25 miles or more for about HK$250.

Your driver buys into this because he wants to avoid the taxi rank queue at the airport. I am not blaming him quite so much because the way the government orders taxi licensing costs, he finds funding a strain and is understandably tempted. You are simply a cheapskate.

You are attempting to arrange a champagne lifestyle on a Tsingtao income and the victim will be the preciously straight, fair and egalitarian taxi meter system, a rarity in these parts, which you are oafishly suborning.

If these “call cabs” persist, they should be stripped of their meters and livery, forbidden from making street pick ups and left to fulfill the role of the London mini cab whereby, for your dealing, you can expect to be driven by a man fresh from Wuhan to the wrong place, have the fare hiked on you in mid journey and the back wheels fall off.

What in fact will happen is that drivers using the meter will take to heart what is being got away with by your driver at Chek Lap kok and eventually the broken meter will lodge dusty on the dashboard like a cracked crown insignia in a bad new republic.. The day will come when taxi drivers everywhere will cruise like crawlers, negotiating  through the passenger window and if business is brisk and your final offer is not good enough, leave you high and wet, standing on the kerb.

So, walk the walk, cheapskate, with your laden trolley and the more rampless kerbs, roundabouts, crash barriers and storm drains there are along your way, the more you might ponder the bus and the train.

Posted in All, Transport