Taxi and Digital Economy in Thai Society

You will never have to flag a taxi again, just two taps of an application and a taxi comes straight to you. Technology aims to make our lives better, easier and of course help us to do more. Today we would like to present you various taxis applications including Grab Taxi, Uber and All Thai Taxi.

As of right now, getting to our destination by taxi is harder than before because many taxis reject passengers. (Have you ever experienced that in Thailand?) However, The Land Traffic Act section93 states that "Driver of a taxi shall not refuse to accept employment convey passengers, except when such conveyance is likely to cause to himself or the passengers.”

Various taxi applications is a new innovative application that allow you to book a taxi immediately or in advance. These applications will automatically detect your current location, so you could share destination and it will assign the nearest driver for you. It will estimate a time that you're going to get the taxi and also estimate metered fare. Once you use this application, you will know within one minute whether you will have a taxi or not.

These applications provide convenient and safe taxis for users and also become a new channel for taxi drivers to augment their income. Passengers can can double check driver’s basic information such as driver's image, phone number, other details and data. They also can track the position or check the route via Google Maps. In addition, they can share their ride with other social media and also text message.

Digital Economy

Today, technology disrupts in almost everything in our lives. The economy is now based on digital computing technologies or we can call it digital economy. Everything becomes easier and we are no longer need to put so much effort to do something anymore. For example, look at our shopping behavior today etc.

Many people find these applications very useful. One is because taxi services are all in their hands.

“Uber is very convenient for me when I go hang out and drink with my friends late at night. I love it because it also doesn’t look like I’m travelling by taxi, but a car so it doesn’t destroy my image,” Natcha Sungsuwan, 32, Uber user said.

We can think of this emerging phenomenon as one of the globalization consequences. People are getting closer and closer. They can connect to each other anywhere at anytime around the world.

Cultural Imperialism

The Cambridge dictionary defines cultural imperialism as “culture of a large and powerful country, organization, etc. having a great influence on the other less powerful country.

The graph above shows the number of fans from three different taxi applications in Thailand as of October 17, 2015. We can see that the highest users rate is Grab Taxi, followed by Uber and All Thai Taxi.

We, as a Thai people are heavily influenced by other countries’ cultures especially western ideologies. Sometimes we thought looking up to the developed countries would help developing our country as well. Many Thai people think that the quality of all western products and services is always better.

“I want All Thai Taxi to keep developing its app and also to give their drivers a better training. Once I used its service, the driver still asked me how to use GPS system and that didn't impress me at all. I was late for work," said Kum Poonsri, 44, an ex-user of All that taxi and a current user of Grab Taxi.

Source: Social Bakers and Droidsans