Taxicab regulation and urban residents' expectations from policy makers: a survey in eight cities

Everywhere in the world, residents want better and cheaper taxi services. But what they mean by better services and how they think prices could be lowered varies widely from one city to the other. These differences underline the specific issues both regulators and taxi operators have to address in each city. Our survey was addressed the city residents of Paris, London, New York, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Berlin, Dublin, Stockholm. These residents were screened to be representative of the urban population of each city in terms of gender, age, and location (centre and suburbs). Our questionnaire included two open questions in which they were asked to give their own opinions on two issues: (i) what reforms would you like your government to implement in your city to make taxi services better cater for your needs and (ii) what are the features of the taxis services you have experienced abroad that you would like to see at home. What we are presenting here is a detailed analysis of the 4700 answers we got to these two open questions. We already presented an analysis of the 40 multiple-choice questions results in a previous paper (2) given at the last World Conference on Transport Research (WCTR 2010 Lisbon).