Your taxi ride is about to get cheaper

BIG changes are coming to the taxi industry. If you live in Sydney, prepare for a whole new experience as drivers get with the times.

Taxis will soon be able to negotiate lower fares with passengers in NSW.

SYDNEYSIDERS can expect to enjoy cheaper taxi rides under new laws aimed at helping drivers compete with Uber.

In a radical change to how the state’s taxi industry is regulated, drivers will be allowed to turn off their meters and offer a lower fare.

Spearheading the reform is the NSW Government’s inaugural point-to-point transport commissioner Barbara Wise, tasked late last year with ushering the industry into the digital age.

“If you’re hailing it (a taxi) in the street or taking it from a rank, it will be a maximum fare. They’ll need to have the price (per km) on the window. But if it’s through an app or on the phone, or any other way that it might be booked, it would be a negotiated fare,” Ms Wise told The Australian.

“Taxis carrying booked customers would not have to use a meter. “I expect that some of them will for quite a while ... but they won’t have to.”

The new rules are expected to come into effect later this year, giving taxi companies time to prepare for added responsibilities for work, health and safety law, previously left to drivers as independent contractors.

“From what I’m hearing from people, they’re looking forward to having a lot more freedom and set up systems in a way that works for them,” she said.

“The old regu­lations told them (taxi companies) exactly what to do and how to do it, and what technology to use. They didn’t have a lot of freedom.”

‘ROOM TO INNOVATE’

Ms Wise is an advocate of ride-sharing and spoke at Uber’s press conference on Wednesday, telling 80 top-rated drivers gathered at the event that she would administer new laws aimed at shaking up the point-to-point transport industry.

“The coming changes will give Uber and its competitors more room to innovate,” Ms Wise promised, adding that taxi drivers would need to “make major changes to their businesses in order to thrive in the future”.

She said surveys showed that the proportion of Sydneysiders using ride sharing had risen from one-in-five to one-in-three, but that this had not taken work away from the taxi industry.

“That’s not at the expense of traditional operators,” she said; “People are still using taxis and the market is growing.”

The NSW Taxi Council said its drivers had higher insurance costs than Uber drivers and were grappling with the lost value of taxi licenses that they paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for.

The Government had allocated $250 million to compensate owners, including $98 million for $20,000 payments per licence to owner drivers and $142 million for helping taxi licence holders facing difficulty due to the change.

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