I just got back from centre of town (about 2am), and it was damn tough getting a cab. We walked for about 15 minutes down the street away from the pubs near Chaoyang West Gate, and finally found a guy. I asked him about the strike, and he just smiled and asked how I knew. On every street corner there were lots of people waving cars down - either there has been a dongzhimen-style hooker explosion, or there are far fewer cabs on the streets tonight...These companies have gotta start giving these guys some more dough.

i found myself stuck in wangfujing, looking for a cab last night. walked for about an hour, and there were people EVERYWHERE similarly frustrated... i think some parts of town were more affected than others. anyway, by the time we got a cab, we'd been informed via sms that there was some sort of 'ba gong' (strike) going on, although my cab driver remained tightlipped about it. another friend's cabbie was a little more forthcoming with information -- it was of course not an organized strike, because an organized strike would be illegal with grave consequences for the organizer(s)... it's not about any action against the cab companies themselves, but rather a statement, as jeremy pointed out, to the powers that be, that they are unhappy. these guys are not making it... and there's no reason for this, except for bad policy. how do shanghai's cabs compare? they always seem clean and the drivers seem to always know the route...

it's their chosen profession - nobody is forcing them to be taxi drivers. 1000-2000 yuan a month is still decent money in china, even in the capital city. if you're comparing them to the salaries of those who work in white collar jobs, then of course it's lower - but isn't that the case everywhere?

i knew a taxi driver in the US who only drove in the summers because of it was a tourist town and he wouldn't make fares in the winter. that was his choice.

what is this site turning into - a pitch for "so called" injustices done to the blue-collar working class of china? why not talk about my father, who worked as an tire man on an oil field? his union saw pay and benefit cuts from one employer and he striked against coca-cola. he was blue collar and suffered more than any taxi driver in beijing. write about him.

they're just taxi drivers - rather than rally for them, rally for better public transport systems in beijing. even if everything worked out and the cabbie was happy, do you still want to be sitting in a taxi for 2 hours a day just up and down sanhuan?

DD:
1000-2000 is not such good money in this city if you have a family to feed. if you have a wife is XIAGANG, a child goes to school which need to pay extra fee every month, and old parents need to go to hospital without enough goverment welfare.
if these drivers need to pay 50% more gas money and losing 40% clients, and their company refuse to get compensation for it as they permised before. It's not only about money.
the drivers is a part of transport systerm of this city, but they are not the one why build it.
by the way, I am sorry to hear the story of your father. if he is a Chinese, after all these suffered, I believe he already become a model worker talking in CCTV's talk show.

I was in WangFuJing with an overseas guest and couldn't get a taxi. We ended up taking one of them Rikshas. After riding for ten minutes, we decided to get off and try getting another taxi. At that point the Riksha driver tried to pretend that the agreed price was in USD and not RMB. When he finally "remembered" that it was RMB, he started whining that he doesn't have enough change and that we should give him a tip because he worked so hard and sweated so much...

It was a dodgy experience. Defiinitely made me miss good old Taxi drivers.

Dror, sorry to hear about your bad experience with the pedicab driver - as a former pedicab operator myself (Seattle, 1992), I can tell you that while the guy was being sleazy with the whole USD vs. RMB "confusion", he wasn't lying about having worked hard, and probably did deserve some sort reasonable tip.

But the subject of Beijing's current taxi slowdown, or strike, or whatever you want to call it, should be looked upon in a wider context, a glimpse not of things to come in some distant future, but of things that are already in progress, namely the slow collapse of a gasoline based society. Currently these appear as mere episodes - taxi drivers unable to make ends meet in Beijing, gas prices rising to European levels in New Jersey, people commuting to work on horseback in medium sized American cities (this made the papers a few months back,a sort of "news of the weird" thing). But these are not mere blips on the radar, but a sign of things to come. So what can we do? Ride more bicycles (remember when this was the norm in Beijing? Wasn't so long ago). Go out and chat with the pedicab drivers and set fair and reasonable rates for their services, and spread the word on which ones are good to do business with and which are less so. Rollerblade (Beijing is a great rollerblading city, except during the sand storms, which both make for bad skating and eat your bearings). But if you're looking at this as a short term problem that's going to dissapear once the government decides to let the drivers hike their fares, or paints special lines on the streets, or whatever short term solution they come up with, you'll be less able to deal with the inevitable. We've seen this coming for a long time.

A lot depends on the monthly feel paid to taxi companies. If taxi fares are raised or whatever, it just may mean that taxi companies are able to charge their drivers more per month. Its supply and demand--not just between taxi driver and rider, but also between company and driver. So do you want to regulate taxi co. fees also? Regulations beget more regulations.

I could just as easily imagine the taxi drivers complaining if the mandatory fare were lowered instead of raised. No easy solution.

Taxi drivers are indeed at the lowest rung, and that is not fair. But you make it seem like there is regular enforcement of traffic laws--when its just crackdowns.

nope, still DD in hong kong. next week it will be DD in beijing, so i guess i'll see if i need to put my foot in my mouth then.

@LDMF: sounds like a lot of "ifs" there. why don't the parents pay for themselves? why does the wife xiagang? why does the kid need an expensive education? from 9 out of 10 cabbies i've met in beijing, they need the extra money for their whoring - not for their family.

this whole thing is actually beneficial for beijing. less people taing taxis means less congestion and pollution and traffic accidents. eliminate the petrol subsidies entirely and let the market dictate what happens.

24 hour subway services, maybe a few major bus lines too. just have fewer trains and buses going around town.

and taxi drivers do try to rip you off by going longer routes. it's from many first hand personal experiences. but the engrish requirement is just FUBAR. but hey with the job market it is right now maybe all those engrish majors can finally get a job come 2008 when you can be sure it'll be 5RMB/km.

enjoy it while it lasts.

I was out all day Saturday and hailed a cab four times, including twice during the day in Wangfujing. But I similarly heard it was difficult to get a cab Saturday night. Methinks 'twas not the strike but the fact that every cabbie in town was in front of the tube watching the England vs Portugal World Cup match that evening

I asked a few drivers if they worked on Saturday, they said "no". When I asked why, they said it is the weekend so they took a day off. I didn't get anyone of them to say anything about a strike...

This is a late comment, one thing that I always remember when people are talking about how hard Beijing Taxi Drivers lives are (and they are hard now) is that up until the early 1990's the taxi drivers were making the BIG bucks (relativly speaking for the time) and they often acted like the real hooligans (that some are). I think this is why they don't have much support from the public now.

This is even later, but as for the comment:
" Its supply and demand--not just between taxi driver and rider, but also between company and driver."

No it isn't - the taxi drivers need to sign long contracts (4 years? 5 years?), with major penalties for breaking them. A lot of them sign the contracts, work for a couple weeks and want to quit, but can't. When the fares or the conditions change it directly affects their income, but they have no way to respond.