Dubai Taxis: The UGLY, THE BAD and THE GOOD

The Ugly:
1. Empty Taxis refusing to STOP and pick up passengers.
2. Taxi Drivers not picking up passengers on a destination intent mismatch.
3. Taxi Drivers preferring females over males as passengers, especially single females.
4. Dirty Taxis with tattered seats and seat covers.
5. Rude Drivers
The Bad:
1. Rates are still high compared to the world prices given the cost of fuel and car prices.
2. Uneducated taxi drivers, not knowing roads and destinations.
3. Shortage of Taxis during peak hours and tendency to Taxi Drivers to concentrate only in the Jumeirah area.
4. The concept of multi emirates taxi where they cannot pick up passengers from a different emirate.
5. The messaging system is a luck based system rather than a good process. (Will elaborate on this later).
The Good:
1. There are individual sparks of goodness and that’s really dependent on the individual person than the process.
2. Dubai Taxis comparatively are better off than the Sharjah or Abu Dhabi ones.
3. The Bad and the Ugly are not applicable to say 50% of the vehicles running.
Will somebody explain this one to me?
I was waiting for a Taxi in Qusais. A taxi stops. When I get in the driver informs me that the starting fare should be 6 AED instead of 3 AED because he has a message flashing for a pick up. I look at the meter monitor and find that the pickup is for a passenger beckoning a cab from emirates hills a place about 35 kms from where I was.
I got irritated with this weird request from the driver and declined the ride. I fail to understand the technology and process behind. There was more to this.
Then I called up Dubai Taxi so that the call center could flash my requirement. I stood there for 20 minutes with empty taxis refusing me and then finally a decent fellow stopped. No he was not carrying my message. I ignored the whole process of calling up the Call Centre and got into this one. The one that Dubai Taxi call center was supposed to have organized---that did not materialize at all!! What happened to my call?

Ranking:

I have ranked Taxis of different cities as per the places I have visited. They are given below for you to agree or disagree!!

Kolkata, India 4/10
Delhi, India 4/10
Mumbai, india 6/10
Tokyo, Japan 9/10
Seoul Korea 8/10
Oslo, Norway 6/10
Dublin, Ireland 7/10
London, UK 7/10
Singapore 8.5/10
KualaLampur 8/10
Dubai 6/10
Paris 8/10

The RTA, Dubai better take steps to improve them rather than protecting the Taxi companies by banning car lifts!!!

Sphere: Related Content