City to intensify illegal taxi crackdown

The government will intensify its crackdown on illegal taxis this year with the number of illegal taxis hailed from the Internet “obviously on the rise,” it said on Wednesday.

Last year, 8,597 illegal taxis were punished, with 145 of them found using the same plates as legal taxis, it said.

Of the taxis punished, 7,737 were hailed via the Internet, while online car-hailing services were ordered to remove over 440,000 illegal taxis from their platforms.

Shanghai requires all Internet taxi drivers to have Shanghai hukou, or registered residency.

There is an increasing number of illegal taxis hailed via the Internet and their drivers often had a low awareness of road safety and sometimes violently resisted law enforcement, the government said.

A citywide crackdown on illegal taxis, focusing on traffic junctions, Metro stations, major tourist sites and shopping hubs, hospitals and residential complexes, will be carried out at least twice a month, with a regional crackdown at least twice a week, the government said.

It will use video surveillance, GPS tracking, data analysis and information from the public to punish the offenders.