Illegal ride-hailing cars to be weeded out by April
More than 800 illegal ride-hailing cars will be cleared out by April, the law enforcement department of Shanghai's traffic authority said on Thursday.
Law enforcement officers have set up a real-time monitoring database which includes the information of all illegal cars that were cleared out. Four platforms, including Didi Chuxing and Meituan Dianping, have uploaded their data.
Illegal ride-hailing refers to either drivers without local residency or cars with non-local plates.
“Once we detect an illegal car back on the road, the platform they are operating under will be held accountable,” said Zhou Guangyu from the traffic authority.
Zhou told Shanghai Daily that by the end of February, more than 300,500 illegal ride-hailing cars had been cleared from the street.
But there are still a good number of illegal cars on the street, Zhou added. The traffic authority is working on a list of another batch of illegal cars and will hopefully catch them by the end of April.
The attitude of the platforms towards the matter is another issue. According to the traffic authority, all ride-hailing platforms have overdue pending penalties on record.
Since 2015, Didi Chuxing has 927 cases that are still pending, which means that illegal cars were caught using the platform many times and nothing was done.
Other platforms also have similar problems. Meituan has 176 cases pending and Car Inc (Shenzhou Zuche) has 408.