Global Positioning Systems in Taxis

Mrs Lina Chiam asked the Minister for Transport whether the Ministry will consider installing global positioning systems in taxis to facilitate future regulations for taxis to ply the roads during official working hours or to ply a minimum mileage.

Mdm Speaker, today we have about 28,000 taxis in our taxi fleet and more than 98% of taxis in Singapore are already equipped with Global Positioning System (GPS)-based location systems. The taxi companies, with the exception of Prime, have equipped their taxis in order to comply with the new Taxi Service Operator Licence (TSOL) requirements that were announced in 2012 and which took effect when they renewed their licences in 2013.

As I said, the only exception is Prime because their licence expires only in 2017, but it is already progressively upgrading its taxis with GPS-based location systems and targets to complete this by the third quarter of 2014.

I thank the Minister for answering the question. I would like to ask the Minister how do we ensure maximum usage of taxis by GPS. Is it possible?

Thank you very much. Mdm Speaker, that is indeed a very good question. It is something that we have been trying to do because we introduced the taxi availability standards that have two basic indicators. The first is to require the taxi, not the driver, to clock 250 km a day. The percentage of the fleet that is required to clock 250 km per day by company has been stepped up. This is the second year of implementation and we will continue to step up the requirement for the percentage to hit 250 km.

In addition to that, we also have a requirement for the percentage of taxis to be on the road or the percentage of taxis to be on the road during various hours of the day. The requirement is, of course, higher during the peak hours. The details are available in LTA's website if the Member is interested.

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