Taxi Plate Regulation Strategy

Taxi is an important mode of transportation in urban areas. It has more volumes and output values than any other mass public transportation, but the inefficient operation of the taxi industry leads to enormous costs for both the industry and the society. It is low capacity utilization that produces the abovementioned situation. This study aims to examine the taxi regulation policies over the years and explain the reasons of the failure of the regulation. The main reasons of the failure of the plate regulation are: the total numbers regulation does not include personally-owned taxies; regulation measures do not reflect real demands; operational areas overlap; the year limitation of taxi renewal is too long; the lack of reasonable recycling system and the existence of un-operating plates. The study uses the interviews for industries, the government and the academia, and also the SWOT analysis to outline fifteen project evaluation criterions of three dimensions - passengers, industries and the society. Then this study clarifies the criterions causes and effects correlation and reject secondary criterions by using” Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory”. The analysis results reveal that the taxi industry’s key problems are stable and guaranteed income, healthy industrial system and industry receptivity. The taxi industry should besides change original service models, and must reduce the plates to reform industry constitution. This study draws up “buys back all surplus plates once”, “rewards purchasing plates gradually” and “takes back the plates in regulated time,” three plate reduction projects. The study takes the “Analytic Network Process” and “VlseKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje” to evaluate projects and the result reveals that “rewards purchasing plates gradually” is the best project. Finally, this study designs the plate grant machine, plate recycling machine, finance sustainability machine and policy sustainability machine according to equity, efficiency, effect and sustainability. At the same time, we must change the original operation area into a closed one, integrating the taxi management authority, constructing taxi drivers’ career counseling machine, taxi driver education training and etc to completely solve the low capacity utilization problem of the taxi industry.