Tom Pepinsky

Category: Travel

  • Remnants of Empire

    We’ve had a good couple of days.  While interviewee confidentiality means that I cannot discuss precisely what we’ve been doing, suffice it to say that we’ve had a great introduction to the Malaysian upper classes.  It’s very cool to see how these folks have really taken over from the British colonial administration in many of their education, mannerisms, and lifestyles.

    This is best visible in the locations where I have been meeting people.  Kuala Lumpur has a series of clubs whose histories stretch back to the British colonial era.  The best known one of these is the Royal Selangor Club, right in the middle of town, which is right next to the field where the Brits used to play cricket (and which is now Independence Square).  Another famous one is the Royal Lake Club, which sits several kilometers from the Royal Selangor Club in KL’s plush garden district.  I hung out there for a bit today, and really got a glimpse of what it must have been like in the early 1930s to be a British colonial administrator.  I had coffee by the pool, and watched bunches of fifty-somethings walking to the squash and tennis courts amidst the big old palm trees and the humid, just-not-quite-refreshing breeze.

    And again, while there were all sorts of Feisals, Lims, and Anandas at these clubs, no one spoke anything other than English.  And this wasn’t Minglish, full of little Malay suffixes, this was The Queen’s Own.  I also noticed that there were no headscarves in evidence, even among the employees.  This probably reflects the difference between this old guard of established fortunes and the new Malay middle classes.

    Now, if we can just finagle a sponsorship…

  • The Economics of Taxis

    One difference between life in Malaysia one year ago and life in Malaysia today is with regards to taxis.  Since we’ve arrived, we’ve noticed a big change in negotiations with taxi drivers.  It used to be that in Kuala Lumpur, if you flagged down a cab, the driver would *almost* always take you where you wanted to go, and use the meter.  There was an exception for the really touristy area of KL known as Bukit Bintang or in front of the Petronas Towers, but besides that, the driver would take you and use the meter, no questions asked.

    That is not the case now.  Now, almost everywhere that we go after around 3PM or with the exception of when we get cabs actually at our hotel, taxi drivers refuse to use their meters.  Instead, they insist on negotiating some absurd price–often about four or five times the metered fare–for the trip.  This is a real problem.  You can often negotiate the price down to about twice the metered fare, but besides that, the drivers refuse to budge.

    We cannot figure this one out.  In essence, this has produced an annoying feature of KL life that all over the city, their are cab drivers sitting around with no passengers, just hanging out at taxi stands and refusing to take people who don’t pay inflated prices.  The reason that this doesn’t make sense is that they are not making any money by just sitting around.  Taxis in KL operate on concessionary bases, like in New York, where they have to pay a fee for the right to use the cab and then they make any take-home pay after that cost.  So by sitting around at taxi stands and refusing to take passengers, or driving around, pulling over, and then refusing to pick you up, they are shooting themselves in the foot. 

    There are two things that explain why there could be a difference between now and a year ago.  (1) Government-mandated gasoline prices have risen, but government-mandated metered taxi fares have not.  (2) Downtown KL is experiencing a construction boom that creates more traffic.  But neither of these can explain why cabbies would be willing to forgo all income by offering absurd prices that price passengers out of the market.  Remember, KL does have pretty good mass transit, so people have options even if they would prefer to take a taxi.  And we know that the market isn’t clearing because there is a surplus
    of cab drivers waiting around and doing nothing as well as a surplus of
    passengers complaining that cabs are too expensive and therefore taking
    the subway even though they would prefer to take a cab.  Furthermore, Indonesia and Singapore have experienced the same construction booms, gas price rises, and steady taxi prices, yet in both countries, taxi drivers will pick you up and use the meter, no problem.

    Any Malaysian readers who can explain this to us?