Am doing this chedet style. Easier for me eyes.

1. In Malaysia, there’s a group of people exists who don’t know where the roads are, they curse at their customers, they smoke when they have passengers, they overprice themselves, they serve people at their leisure and they make the country look really bad. Who are this group of people? Taxi drivers, the bane of beautiful and *coughs* wonderful Malaysia. Ruthless and heartless (not all but most of them), they prey on their victims like hawks hunting rabbits and when they capture their prey they toy with their food like cats do with mice. It’s a harsh reality but no one seems to be able to do anything about it except lamenting and moaning. I guess it’s no surprise (I really hate this expression) when a magazine named The Expat rated Malaysia’s overall taxi services as the worst among 30 countries.
2. I remembered once when I read that taxi drivers were protesting against LCCT (I don’t really remember the details) because the LCCT was favoring the premium taxis over the normal ones. I can’t help laughing when I read it. Come on, if I were to manage LCCT, I’d do the same, why would I keep a bunch of taxi drivers who will give bad publicity? Well, who would actually keep them?
3. I for one do not know how the taxi business operates, but from what I’ve read and heard, taxi licenses are not individually-owned. I’ve heard of taxi drivers complaining how they have to pay the rent of the car (and license too?) to the company, which is rated on a daily basis. The rates can go on from RM50 to RM80 (I have no sources for this, only verbal sources from my memory). If you add fuel, toll and maintenance (locally made car, go figure), you’d see that being an honest taxi driver would produce more loss than gains, hence natural selection plays a role.
4. I’d like to relate whatever I learn with real-life situations, so in this case, Darwin’s Theory can be used. In natural selection, the better your fitness is, the higher the probability for you to produce more offspring which in turn will maintain your species. We can relate the profits gain by a taxi driver as his or her fitness level.
5. Evolution also plays a role here. It is one of the principles of evolution that a species do not evolve, it is the whole population that evolves. When a taxi driver imposes prices without a meter, there will be protests by the customers. To adapt to this protests, that taxi driver becomes ruthless and ruder which intimidates the customers and also taking into account the fast-paced life in the city, the customers are forced to adhere to the taxi driver’s demands. This creates an environment that enables taxi drivers with these uncouth traits to flourish. Other species in the population would then notice the stark change of these individuals and so they learn/inherit (because their humans, so it’s a special case) this trait. End result? Population evolved with uncouth taxi drivers being the dominant ones and honest taxi drivers being the minority.
6. Blaming and moaning about this is quite uhh… dull because it’s been done by hundreds if not thousands of bloggers out there. So I’d like to state solutions rather than moaning. One proposed solution that I’ve read was permitting the license to be individually owned, I guess that would help the taxi drivers a lot because it will cut down the starting (and overrated at that) cost of being a taxi driver. If this is done then maybe those honest taxi drivers can form an “Honest Taxi Drivers Association” (according to source, to obtain the permit you’ll have to be in an organization or association). Then customers would learn of this association and frequent cabbies of this association and soon, according to natural selection, cabbies would inherit/learn good traits knowing that it is vital for their survival. This would need necessary regulation and supervision like trainings, courses, inspections, etc (something our country lacks) as to keep drivers in check.
7. If that cannot be done or if it fails (I hope it does go on, I want an Honest Cabbies Association!!!) we can get rid of the meters and propose a standardized rates like those done in other countries. Though it will take a lot of time to plan this, implementing it would make life easier for everyone. Maybe it can start off on a small scale, on a state-level for example and then if it works, it can be implemented nationwide. But the hard part would be informing the consumers because some people can be really ignorant and some taxi drivers might want to keep the customers in the dark. But if you put great minds to work, a lot of things can be done.
8. So ends my two cents for the day.