For personal reasons which I won’t bore y’all with, we’ve been forced to make a lot of use of the incomparable Amsterdam taxi system lately. It’s not been a good experience, the one or two excellent drivers notwithstanding. Our experiences are not unique; Amsterdam taxis are some of the worst in Europe, as I’m sure Frumious Bandersnatch will agree with:
However, I’ve heard that it has gotten better at Central Station. I heard that they have supervision. And I actually didn’t have a choice. So I walked to the head of the line.
First thing that I noticed. No supervision. No idea if he/she was getting coffee or just gone for the day. Uh-oh.
I went to the first driver in the row. He informed me that this would be 15 euros. I said that I wanted to go with the meter. He said that he only worked with a zone system, so it was 15 euros everything between 1-5 kilometers. (I know from experience that a taxi ride to where I needed to go was generally maximum 12 euros) I told him that I knew this wasn’t true and I had the right to go with the meter. He told me to “go find a TCA driver since they charge less.” He insisted that they were allowed to charge more for central station. (For non-Dutch people, TCA was the former big bad monopoly that got broken up in Amsterdam to protect the consumer. Ha.)
I looked around again to see if I could find their minder, but there was nobody visible. I went to the second taxi in the row. That person also refused to drive with the meter to Oost, and told me that I had to go with the first taxi. “Nobody here will use the meter,” he told me snottily.
The third taxi was from TCA. He told me that I had to go to the first taxi. He got abusive when I said that the first driver refused to go with the meter. He said “I won’t drive with the meter either.” By this point, one of the other drivers in the line had shouted at me to “fuck off”.
Another TCA taxi driver (farther back in the line) said that he didn’t dare to do otherwise besides do what the rest in the line did.
It doesn’t get any better from there. Such experiences are all too common, especially around the tourist heavy areas of the city centre like Central Station or Museumplein. The irony is, for most tourist destinations there are plenty of cheap, easy to use and fast public transport options to use instead. but if you don’t know that as a tourist, your natural instinct is to use a taxi and nine times out of ten they’ll take you for a ride. Central Station to Dam Square, with its quota of fancy hotels, is only a ten minute walk or a five minute tram ride; take a cab and they’ll either tell you to fuck off for wasting their time with such a short ride (that’s the honest ones) or they’ll show you the entire city and deliver you there an hour later.
The problem is that Amsterdam went from a monopoly situation in which there was only one taxi company, TCA, which only had to provide Soviet levels of service, to one in which everybody with a dodgy twenty year old Mercedes Benz could call himself a taxi driver. Too many taxi drivers chasing too few customers with no time for short rides, no time to be concerned with anything but getting the next fare in. Neither situation was ideal, to say the least.
The Amsterdam taxi market needs reform badly, but any solution that leaves either a load of freelancers or some sort of monopoly or duopoly in place isn’t going to work. In both cases there is the problem that the people driving the taxis are entirely dependent on their taxi to make a living and the pressure to chase golden rides remains. What Amsterdam needs I feel is to make the taxis into some sort of semi-public transport, with the drivers on a proper wage and the customers knowing what they get into when they step into the cab.
Branko Collin
August 8, 2009 at 4:42 amHm, based just on what you just wrote I would say the problem is totally different.
There seem to be two problems that both have to do with the information that suppliers and buyers need to reach an optimum price point. One is that buyers of cab services are typically underinformed, either because they are strangers to the city, or because they’re too drunk to think straight.
The other is that the person you linked to had certain expectations about how cabs work, and apparently his Amsterdam experience fell way short of that. In other words, commercial, free-lance cab systems seem to work just fine elsewhere, or at least noticeably better.
Now that last bit is interesting, because if you want a solution to the Amsterdam problem, the first thing you probably should do is see why cabs work in every other city of the world, except Amsterdam.