Last Sunday I had to go and drop my mother in law off at the airport which is only about a 40 minute drive. I know she is a person who likes to be early so I said we would leave 4 hours before her flight which would give her plenty of time to do what old people do.
The drive took shorter than expected getting to the airport in under 30 minutes except the last 2 kilometers took over an hour due to a police road block. My car was not stopped but may as well have been due to the slowness of the checks taking place.
Today the police were checking the e hailing taxis/cabs serviced by Uber, Bolt and inDriver making sure they are registered and licensed. Very little policing gets done in South Africa so you cannot really complain when they are doing their work even though where they did this spot check was questionable. Thankfully we had left early and had not counted on this happening so the in law was still early.
Making public transport like e hailing taxis safer and regulated is definitely needed as the public would like to know whoever is driving is legal and insured. Legal having a current license and a legal member of society who is not a foreigner who has no papers. Many of these drivers do take a chance by not using the apps and park in the pick up points hoping to pick up passengers without using the apps so they do not have to pay the app 50% of the fare. If te drivers are caught doing this they are blocked from the apps and why I guess they are attracted to the airport if they are banned.
The reason why the road block that day was so slow is that I counted over 200 of these e hailing taxis that were lined up and impounded with police cars lined up to escort them to the pound. What it looked like was these drivers had been removed from the apps and were no longer registered so they cannot be offering a taxi service legally even if the car has the e hailing logo on the doors.
The Oliver Tambo airport in Johannesburg is the most lucrative earner for the Traffic Department in the entire country. The 200 plus vehicles would pay fines worth more than R1 million to get their cars back at R5K per vehicle which is roughly 10 days work using the app legally. This number of taxis being impounded shows how many were operating illegally and highlights the scale of the problem. I would say that the e hailing apps have asked the police for help as this has to be affecting their businesses as the fares are being stolen by the same people they have been employing.
The commissions have been increasing steadily with reports suggesting over the last 5 years the apps have lost around 70% of the revenue they were earning which suggests either less people using the apps or fares being stolen. I do not think it is the number of users dropping, but more to do with the drivers picking people up for cash operating as a normal taxi by parking in hot spots for passenger collections like airports.
I have used UBER twice one being legal and the second time illegally not using the app more out of ignorance and now I understand the scale of the problem these e hailing apps have with rogue drivers. I have to admit the driving standard was not great and you are kind of happy to make it home safely. I would not be using this service again in this country and would pay extra for a genuine taxi/shuttle service.