How green was my cabbie?

7th August 2010

By Giles Wade

You can’t help getting a bit superstitious after living for a few years in such a crazy country as China.  Every time you take a taxi in Beijing, it’s like drawing a lottery number.  You anxiously scan the driver’s Taxi Supervision Bureau registration card displayed on the dashboard facing the front passenger seat… and if the number begins ’22-‘, you get tempted to hop out again and try your luck with somebody else.

The taxi registration numbers, you see, have six digits, and the most recently issued ones seem to be in the ‘28****’s.  (I’d guess there must be a few ‘29****’s out there by now, but I haven’t come across one yet.)  It would thus appear that new taxi licenses are being doled out these days at a fairly steady rate of nearly 10,000 a year.  I suppose that represents a fairly high churn rate, given that the figure for the number of taxis in the city I see quoted is usually around 70,000.  However, that probably is the number of cars, rather than the number of licensed drivers; naturally, there’s quite a bit of car-sharing across shifts.  Also, quite a few drivers must quit the job fairly early on, unable to take the stress it involves or to make a decent living out of it.  And I believe quite a few drivers get the qualification to help them into other jobs – driving limousines or tour buses – without ever taking up the noble profession of taxi-driving.

So, there are quite a number of drivers out there who’ve been doing the job for 8 or 10 years now.  There are just a few who’ve stuck at it for 15 or 20 years or more.  If the first two digits of the registration number are in the low teens, then he’s a hoary old veteran.  If you find one whose number begins with a zero (it does still happen, very occasionally), he’s probably been plying the trade since the early days of Deng Xiaoping’s ‘reform & opening up’ in the 1980s.

The basic rule, then, is “old, good; new, bad; low numbers, good; high numbers, bad” – right?  Oh no, it’s not that simple.  Some of the guys with the very old registrations are indeed genial, bearded sages who might seem more at home sat cross-legged atop a sacred mountain.  They will cut through traffic as if it is but an unsubstantial delusion of the unenlightened, dispense pearls of wisdom on the simple life, and, when you don’t have the exact fare for them, let you off the small change with a forgiving shrug and a beneficent smile.  Then again, many of them are grouchy old loons who’ve been in the job far too long and whose misanthropy is starting to shade over into outright psychopathy (fortunately, their ire is usually directed towards other drivers rather than you, the passenger – but it doesn’t make for a safe or comfortable ride).  And the majority, who fall in that middle ground between saint and demon, have usually been utterly overwhelmed by the pace of change in this city: bewildered by the relentless obliteration of old familiar neighbourhoods and by the proliferation of skyscrapers and über-malls in the last decade, they will usually try to stick to a narrow tract of well-known turf - and will get pathetically lost if you force them to venture anywhere else.

Ah, and then, of course, there are the cherub-cheeked youths who’ve evidently bought their license off an uncle on his retirement, rather than running the hazard of trying to take the test themselves (I got a ‘08****’ last year who was only in his mid-twenties, probably not even born when his license was issued).  No, the low numbers aren’t always a reliable indicator of a taxi driver who knows where he’s going or knows how to drive.  You’re usually better off with someone in the ’17-‘ to ‘19’ range, someone who’s probably got nearly a decade on Beijing’s roads under his belt by now.

Paradoxically, the newer numbers are often pretty good, too.  The very new ones alarm me slightly with their lack of experience (and their obvious lack of familiarity with the outline map of the capital; if you get one who’s not even familiar with the Ringroad system, you know you’re in trouble). But the ones whose numbers begin with a ’24-‘, ’25-‘, or ’26-‘ are mostly pretty damn good.  It’s one of the few things I thank the Beijing Olympics for: the Taxi Supervision Bureau actually started doing its job for a few years, scrutinising applicants for new licenses, administering the qualification test with some kind of seriousness, and even introducing some training initiatives.  Prior to that, we had gone through a particularly bad spell where licenses were seemingly being sold willy-nilly to any ambitious peasant who thought that a few hours’ experience in the seat of his village’s tractor was adequate qualification. Not all the new recruits in that ’21-‘ to ’23-‘ range were that awful, but a very high proportion of them were.  Most of those who’ve now survived in the job for 5 years or so are starting to develop some basic competencies.  But some are still struggling.

That’s why, when I get in a cab with a ’21-‘, ’22-‘, or ’23-‘ driver registration number, my heart sinks a little – and I begin to fret that it’s a bad omen for the day ahead.