HCMC vice chairman Nguyen Thanh Tai has told the city’s Transport Department and the HCMC Taxi Association to consider a pause in registering new taxis.

According to the vice director of the Transport Department, Duong Hong Thanh, HCMC has 35 taxi enterprises with some 10,710 cars operating around the city.

In an earlier report sent to the city government, Thanh noted that the annual rate of taxi growth was some 14%, too fast compared to the earlier plan for transport development in the city to 2020 and beyond.

Thanh said that under the plan for transport development, the city aimed at having some 9,500 taxis during the period of 2010 to 2015, but the current number of taxis was already 12.7% over target. The number of taxis in the city is already equivalent to some 84% of the city’s expected taxi population of 12,700 by 2020.

“The higher-than-expected number of taxis is leading to an implicit risk of worsening traffic jams for the city unless the city has a drastic solution to hold back taxi development,” Thanh said, adding that new taxi registrations were only acceptable to replace cars over 12 years old.

On the other side of the fence, Ta Long Hy, chairman of the Taxi Association, told the Daily on Wednesday that the current number of taxis was insufficient compared to the increasing passenger demand.

“I have just asked some 20 taxi enterprises of the association to give their opinions over the instruction of the city government, and we expect to meet with the Transport Department by the end of this week to share our opinions,” Hy said.

According to the Transport Department, besides the increase of motorbikes, the rapid increase of newly registered cars in the city is also a menace.

Tran Quang Phuong, director of the Transport Department, said at an urban transport seminar in September that the city had some four million motorbikes and some 400,000 cars, not including one million motorbikes and 60,000 cars from other provinces.

Phuong stressed that while road surface in the city increased by only 0.3% each year, the annual increase of cars exceeded 15%.

VietNamNet/SGT