Dear Mr Know-It-All,
Despite having lived in Hong Kong almost all my life, I’ve never figured out why the different colors of taxis exist. I suspect they started back in the day when there were practical reasons to allow/restrict taxis from serving certain areas. But Hong Kong is not that big and nowadays people travel everywhere! It fuels bad behavior from the taxi drivers (refusing to take you to Kowloon or NT, asking for a higher fare). I haven’t been able to find a good answer for my questioning guests. How did this taxi culture come about? On a side note, when can we start using Octopus/credit cards in taxis? I thought we are a “world-class city!”
—Color Cab Quandary
The answer is one of geography, CCQ. Each year, 956,000 people use taxis in Hong Kong. If you were a taxi driver who had free roam of the SAR, would you rather spend your day wandering the New Territories for long-distance fares, or would you rather camp out in Mong Kok or Central and make short, profit-making hops between districts? Exactly. The red (Hong Kong Island/Kowloon), green (NT) and blue (Lantau) taxis actually exist to help keep demand satisfied in the farther-flung areas of the territory.
That doesn’t explain why red taxis refuse to cross the harbor. Taxi drivers are legally bound to take you where you want to go—but they’re not bound to have the knowledge of the city that, for instance, London’s cab drivers do. So either a) they know nothing about the land beyond the sea or b) they really don’t like tunnels.
About paying by Octopus. There are 18,138 taxis in Hong Kong: 15,250 red, 2,838 green and 50 blue. And of those, 500 taxis are actually fitted with Octopus card readers. It took 10 years of negotiation to agree to a trial run in 2006, but the scheme wasn’t successful: the taxis had to return to the depot daily for accounting purposes, and the scheme lapsed. Since then, the tech has improved: but takeup has been slow, because Octopus payments take a day to process. When you’re a cab driver having to pay between $600-800 daily rent on your taxi, plus fuel costs—it’s nice to have every dollar you can get, as soon as possible. So next time, don’t begrudge it when your taxi driver keeps the extra 50 cents. We’ve all gotta make rent, after all.
Mr. Know-It-All answers your questions and quells your urban concerns. Send queries, troubles or problems to [email protected].
