End of the road for the 'taxi-driver village'?

By Zhou Mo (China Daily) Updated: 2016-04-22 07:32

A woman walks along a street lined with taxis in Dawang village, Shenzhen, Guangdong province, in February. The village is home to many taxi drivers and their families. Zhang Wei/For China Daily

The rise of car-hailing companies has crippled the independent cab trade in Dawang, a small settlement in southeastern China that's home to more than 1,000 drivers and their families. Zhou Mo reports from Shenzhen, Guangdong province.

For about a decade, residents of the Luohu district of Shenzhen, Guangdong province, watched a ritual every evening at dusk as a fleet of taxis spiraled along a narrow mountain road and entered Dawang at the foot of Wutong Mountain.

But the past year has seen changes in "taxi-driver village", as Dawang is known. New online cab-hailing services have been snapping up business, resulting in many taxis disappearing and being replaced by private cars whose drivers use the new platforms.

Lured by the good money, many drivers in the village have abandoned their taxis and started working for private companies, such as Didi Chuxing and Uber.

Dawang gained its nickname thanks to the large number of cab drivers who live there. Few of them are locals, though; and most come from Youxian, a county in the central province of Hunan.

About 1,000 people in the village are now employed exclusively by Didi Chuxing, according to an article published on FiftyKM, one of the company's accounts on WeChat, a popular instant-messaging platform.

Full-time drivers are only allowed to use private vehicles, so every defection means one taxi fewer on the roads.

"Driving a taxi isn't profitable anymore. We (the drivers) had to find another way to survive," said Li Jianbing, a driver from Youxian who joined Didi Chuxing in September.

"Driving a car on the company's platform, I can earn about 12,000 yuan ($1,856) a month. If I still drove my taxi, I would only make 6,000 to 7,000 yuan, which would make it hard to feed my family in the big city."

In the past two years, the popularity of the new services has soared in China. Didi Chuxing operates in hundreds of cities, with daily orders reaching 10 million. The company said 1.43 billion cars were ordered via its platform nationwide last year.

Safety issues

However, while the new services are popular with the public, their sudden market dominance, which has resulted in the need to recruit more drivers, has raised questions about passenger safety.

A report published by the Shen-zhen Transportation Commission estimates that 1,425 drivers working for online platforms have a history of drug abuse, and 1,662 had serious criminal records before taking up their current jobs, raising questions about screening procedures.

The city government has pledged to step up efforts to regulate the emerging industry to ensure fair competition and passenger safety. It has also urged online ride-hailing companies to comply with the law, accept their social responsibilities and resolve problems quickly.