Street-hailed rides dwindle as S'pore's taxi population continues to shrink

Sticking your arm out to flag down a taxi has become a less popular – or more difficult – method of getting a ride.

- Christopher Tan

According to the latest available statistics from the Land Transport Authority (LTA), just over 12 per cent of point-to-point trips were street-hailed in November 2023, down from 22 per cent in January 2021, when the authority first started providing the segmental information.

There were 77,000 street-hailed rides a day last November, down from 129,000 in January 2021. The number of taxi trips secured by phone call bookings is estimated at 100,000 a day in 2023, up from 85,000 in 2021.

The sharp drop in street hails is likely to be related to the shrinking taxi population, as only taxis are allowed to accept street hails.

LTA figures show that the number of taxis has shrunk from 15,888 in January 2021 to 13,622 in November 2023. At its peak in 2014, the cab population stood at 28,736. This was before ride-hailing firms started to grow their private-hire fleets aggressively.

The number of chauffeured private-hire cars has ballooned from 614 in 2013 to 53,448 in 2023 – an 80-fold increase in 10 years. Even so, this is slightly smaller than the pre-Covid-19 population of 55,575.

These taxi-like vehicles catered to an estimated 70 per cent of 616,000 point-to-point commutes last November, compared with around 63 per cent of the 576,000 daily rides in January 2021.