TAXICABS in Dhaka city are still in small number but drivers are often blamed for not properly respectful to commuters’ travel-destination choices. The high fare rates fixed by the concerned authorities are also hardly affordable by fixed income people. These are part of many impediments including impolite behaviour of cab drivers causing existential crisis to city taxicab services, but we can’t surrender to these setbacks if we want to see that our cities are playing taxicab services like other cities in the world. Excessive fares and cab drivers’ refusal to take short-distance trips are mainly blamed for major causes of poor commuters’ response to cab service in Dhaka city. People keep the distance from them while they move empty in city streets for big passengers without much success. Cab operators also routinely face traffic police harassment when their area of businesses is equally shrinking from competition of rental car syndicates. Attacks from muggers are also there in a poor law and order situation hindering the expansion of the service. The government is not paying the due attentive to this problem when shortage of permanent taxi stands in city corners is also causing setback to make the service readily available and popular. News reports in a national daily on Friday said two latest taxicab service-providers – Trust Transport Services (TTS) owned by Army Welfare Trust and Toma Taxi Services by a private company suffered the setback from importing huge taxicab fleet as they found passengers’ response quite poor to recover investments. Revenue from playing limited number of cabs in the streets proved it is not enough and it forced TTS to withdraw the entire fleet of 150 cabs from Chittagong city eight months after the launch. Many cabs are often sitting idle in Dhaka city corners as well without call. It is unfortunate that we can’t even establish a world-class taxicabs service in our capital city when such services are in existence even in very small cities in other parts of the world. Though it is true that in a society where the middle-income families have not enough resources to spend in high taxi fares, we believe it is the responsibility of the government to create the positive environment to offer affordable fare and harassment free city cab system. They must have the call services for taxicabs to take passengers from certain places to destination of their choice. Users will also expect good cab drivers behaviour and the company must ensure it by motivation and proper training.Many believe the operators may also rightly demand some fiscal privileged to build the services as part of our social transformation in city traffic system. The authorities can’t ignore such privilege if they are serious to bring about such transformation in city traffic.
