Surveillance Cameras to Be Used for Deliquent Cabbies
By Kwon Mee-yoo
Staff Reporter
Around midnight in downtown Seoul or Gangnam's boulevards, a battle to catch a taxi begins. In this war, it is not the prospective passengers but the cabbies who are the king.
They pick and choose from a crowd of customers for bigger fares or longer journeys.
Seoul City Hall plans to enlist the help of surveillance cameras to catch the delinquent taxi drivers and slap stiff fines on them.
Kim Ji-won, a 28-year-old office worker, said it is frustrating trying to get a taxi in Jongno late at night. Kim said she spent more than 20 minutes to get one during the year-end season.
"I live some 10 minutes away from downtown and taxi drivers refused to take me," Kim said. "I thought about reporting it to the police."
Seoul City said it received 7,022 civil complaints about taxi drivers refusing to accept passengers last year. It is a sizable decrease but the city said that it will settle the problem once and for all.
"We believe that as the minimum fare was raised to 2,400 won from 1,900 won in last June, more taxi drivers are less selective," a city official said.
However, only 23 percent of those who were reported as having rejected passengers were fined. The fines range from 100,000 to 300,000 won. 53 percent were just given reprimands.
When a customer files a complaint against a taxi driver for refusing to pick them up, by calling 120, Seoul's one-stop call center, the city calls in the driver and company staff to check the complaint and the result is sent to each district office.
"It is difficult to punish cabbies for rejecting passengers because only the driver and passenger know what actually happened. If their opinions do not accord with each other, most of the drivers receive warnings," the official said.
Kim Kyung-ho, director-general of the city's Transportation Policy Bureau, said Seoul plans to use CCTVs for the crackdown. "We are simulating the system now and will start it as early as February in downtown areas where many taxi drivers only take long-distance passengers," Kim said.