Taxicab regulators ‘asleep at the wheel’ over rogue cabbies

An industry body says it’s had to “regulate the regulators” in response to a plague of independent taxi drivers happy to ask for extortionate fares

Freewheeling cabbies lurk outside concert venues and nightlife districts with steep fares and unregulated working hours.

Late-night revellers have become easy prey for independent taxi drivers bound by little in the way of meter and fare regulations.

That’s what industry body leaders say, and they blame widespread deregulation that landed in 2017.

It’s been six years since the Land Transport Amendment Act 2017, which saw sweeping changes to taxis and other small passenger services.

These included the removal of overseeing approved taxi organisations, signage requirements, meters, many forms of driver certification and in many cases, in-vehicle cameras.

Waka Kotahi sold these changes as a levelling of the playing field between different forms of small passenger transport following the introduction of new technology like ride-sharing apps.

“The changes are designed to enable the sector to be responsive to customer needs, encourage competition, allow for new technology and maintain safety for participants,” the agency wrote.

But members of the Small Passenger Service Association say deregulation has allowed cowboy drivers to take advantage and operate without crucial oversights like cameras, panic buttons, metered fares or accounting for hours worked.

Following the 2017 changes, the small passenger service sector can be split up into three categories: traditional taxi companies still complying to the old standards, rideshare with limited oversight from their big companies like Uber, and independents with little to no practical oversight.

Each provides a very different avenue of complaint or redress for a spurned consumer.

With traditional companies, you can go to the overseeing association. 

If you have an issue with your Uber you can use the app itself to lodge a complaint (should you manage to navigate the oft-labyrinthine user interface).

But with an independent driver, Waka Kotahi suggests people get in touch with the driver themselves directly.

“You might as well get your passenger endorsement out of a Weet-Bix packet.” - Small Passenger Service Association president Grant Scannell

This isn’t always an easy task - and in cases where there have been allegations of sexual assaults, it’s not good advice at all.

Small Passenger Service Association executive director Warren Quirke receives frequent complaints from people who’ve been ripped off by independent taxi drivers - especially after the weekend.

He said independent drivers overcharging posed a risk for taxis that follow the rules of the association.

“It’s of huge reputational damage for the brand of taxis,” he said. “I had a complainant who had been overcharged by one of these independent drivers come back to me and say 'I normally use Uber and now, I’m going to stick to Uber'.”

One of the big changes rolled out in 2017 was removing the need for taxis to use meters. It was a move to allow for a broader, new-fangled version of passenger transport that was beginning to take over the country. Uber and other ride-sharing apps had arrived and quickly picked up their share of the consumer market.

In 2017, metered fares, vehicle signage and roof lights all became optional for taxis. So began the era of pre-negotiation on a fare.

But Quirke and other registered taxicab company operators are constantly hearing about how these negotiations can fall through, and of drivers stinging passengers with surprisingly high numbers once they’ve reached their destination.

Grant Scannell is president of the association, as well as managing director of Queenstown Taxis. He said he liked to head down to Queenstown’s main taxi rank on a weekend night and see what’s going on.

“I quite often just go down to the main stand and have a wee listen, watch people walk away and swear and curse and things like that,” he said.

Recently he’d seen a customer trying to get from the CBD to Fernhill, a trip of less than 3km or a six-minute drive.

Of the three independent drivers he approached, they all offered him a fare of over $50.

Then there was a passenger who was charged $109 for a trip of around 5.5km - closer to an air fare than a cab fare. 

Scannell said there had also been issues requiring police attention, with phones taken as collateral until passengers cough up.

“The police are at their wits' end,” he said. "They’ve just come to a point where they say they're watching these independents go past with no headlights on, and they say they’re just over it - they literally do not have the resources to be mucking around with it.”

Association vice-president James Hart represents taxi stalwarts Corporate Cabs.

He said cities like Queenstown were ripe with this kind of activity due to the amount of tourists who may not know what a reasonable cab fare is.

“It's a blight on the reputation of the resort town, particularly for international tourists,” he said. “As we've been saying to the local council over the last couple of years, you don't want to have an extra portion in a Lonely Planet guidebook or on TripAdvisor about this... because in many ways the impression a person gets in a small passenger service vehicle is their first and last impression of interacting with Kiwis.”

Scannell said he’d been out looking at cabs on holiday weekends and over the summer break in Queenstown’s CBD, and noticed high numbers of cars registered further afield - often places like Timaru or Christchurch.

That suggests it’s become worth it for these independent drivers to make the trip out into the mountains in order to nab a few of those kingly tourist fares, or capitalise on a high-demand event weekend.

The association said many of these drivers were part-time - moonlighting from other jobs or even usual Uber gigs in order to strike while the iron is hot.

And the iron is never hotter than outside a Harry Styles concert in a city struggling to provide its own citizens with public transport.

Newsroom heard from a woman who wandered out of Dave Chappelle’s recent show in Auckland right into queues of cabs on Quay St.

“The first two drivers just refused to take us, saying it wasn’t far enough. The third driver said he’d take us, for $50. We asked him to turn the meter on and just take us on that. He told us to get out of his taxi. We asked him if this was legal. He covered his ID pic and number on the dash and refused to budge, so we got out. We wrote down his licence plate. It wasn’t until then that we noticed none of the taxis had any numbers or info on them, just a lit ‘taxi’ sign on their lids.”

These days getting a taxi roof light is no sure sign of being registered as a small passenger service provider, either, with a quick search for the lights on AliExpress netting dozens of cheap options.

The association members said getting licensed to take passengers was a process that used to ensure safety and knowledge of local areas.

“You might as well get your passenger endorsement out of a Weet-Bix packet,” Scannell said. “A lot of these guys aren’t fit and proper to be driving.”

The gutting of the endorsement process happened at the same time as 2017's deregulations. It stripped out the need for registered drivers to have knowledge of law, local area, English language proficiency or membership of an approved taxi organisation.

The association members argued this wasn’t just bad for fair fares or even consumer safety, it could also have an impact on the safety of the drivers themselves. Removing obligations to have driver panic buttons and cameras in many cases could put drivers in vulnerable positions.

“While the government says they created a level playing field, that’s not the case at all,” James Hart said.

He said it was the result of government activity only interested in getting “quick wins” rather than finding long-term solutions for the sector.

At the time of the amendment, former National Party leader Simon Bridges had the transport portfolio.

At the time, he said the changes were in place to simplify regulations and ensure rules on taxis were fit-for-purpose as new technology like smart phones and apps changed the playing field.

But in the years since, the association members said the deregulation had allowed rule-breaking drivers to operate undeterred by overseeing bodies.

“No meaningful oversight emboldens greater deviant behaviour and makes it difficult for reputable taxi companies to enforce standards,” Hart said.

He said the lack of political will to bring in regulations that would make it difficult for widely popular ride-sharing services to operate might get in the way of fixing the problem.

“There’s a real lack of willingness to clean this up and there seems to be a lot of justification as to why this is able to continue…” he said. “We feel like we are regulating our regulator, and it's not our job to get them to impose standards on our industry, they should be dictating them to us - but they are really asleep at the wheel when it comes to this.”