A Thanh Nga Taxi found cheating foreign tourists
Hoang Van Manh, Deputy Chief Inspector of the municipal Department of Transport said that one popular way of cheating on fares is putting a chip into the meter that can be controlled remotely by the driver with a cell phone.
Despite efforts by the authorities, taxi operations in the capital have yet to improve.
Manh attributed the situation to uncontrollable taxi operations in the city.
“While HCM City has only 31 taxi companies with 15,000 vehicles, Hanoi has 117 companies with 17,000 vehicles. This means that an average sized taxi company in HCM City has hundreds of vehicles, while in Hanoi and average sized company may only have five or ten," he said.
A driver from Trung Viet Taxi forced to return money and apologize
He proposed merging smaller taxi companies together so that there would only be 50 to 60 taxi companies in the city. This, he said, would be much more manageable.
Thach Nhu Sy, Deputy Chief Inspector of the Ministry of Transport, said they have found it difficult to deal with the violations of taxi firms, because they are often very good at taking advantage of loopholes in the law.
He added that several taxi company owners regularly make false declarations as to the number of vehicles in their fleets. Several companies rent vehicles or allow drivers to use their own, making them more difficult to regulate and leading to unpredictable service.
