LTA has revealed that plans are in the works for private hire operators to obtain a Street Hail Service Operator Licence (SSOL), which basically means companies such as Grab and Go-Jek can offer street hailing services if they obtain the licence.
Currently, private hire drivers can only do a booking based pick up system, meaning their drivers can only pick passengers up with prior bookings. Only taxi companies can do both street hailing services and booking services. In fact, most of a taxi's daily business comes from street hails, accounting for as much as 70% of the 650,000 taxi trips a day.
In an already saturated market for taxi drivers, it seems like they will have more competion from the private hire operators, as once they have the licence to do so, this will eat up more of the pie on which taxi drviers use to survive.
The taxi and private hire driver market is going to change once again.
