- E-bike season starts as spring arrives, ending winter hibernation and car reliance
- Pre-app taxi hailing was risky; scarce cabs, haggling fares, and urban legends
- Didi revolutionized transport with GPS, app bookings, and premium, sensory-friendly options
- Taxis improved with accountability, though occasional odd encounters keep life interesting
I got my e-bike out today. As the Year of The Snake crawls into March, and the cherry blossoms burst into bloom, the days grow longer and life returns to those of us who have spent the winter in hibernation. Hibernation season begins the day the ebike is retired and four-wheeled friends become my mode of transport. A lot has changed since our first Year of The Snake 12 years ago, and although I’m usually wary of sweeping generalisations, in this case, it has all been for the better.
Back then, before the dawn of WeChat or Alipay, hailing a cab was an entirely different experience to today’s app-flicking simplicity. It was a much more rough and ready undertaking for a multiplicity of reasons.
Firstly, you had to actually spy one of these elusive creatures in the wild and flag it down.
Xianlin was still in its infancy as a suburban centre back then, so they were few and far between. It didn’t help that I had two babies and an unwieldy double buggy which made many drivers speed on by.
The first option was by and far the most dodgy. You could approach a so-called “Black Taxi”; a ragtaggle collection of ramshackle vehicles that parked at the gates of compounds and drove intrepid customers around the city. Without a license or a meter in sight, it was a reliable but somewhat nerve-wracking experience. Was the driver drunk, or did he always drive like this? Was this an illegal taxi or had I hopped in beside an axe-murderer? Who was that other person asleep in the passenger seat? So many questions.
Better by far to hail a yellow taxi (or green, depending on which side of our fair city you dwell).
If you did manage to lure a passing taxi to the curb, the next challenge was to negotiate the fare which meant, a), speaking to the driver, and b), really asking yourself the question “How badly do I need this cab?”. Even if you did manage to convince the driver to turn on the meter, they could still detour their way to a similarly outrageous fare, turning a ten minute trip into an odyssey.
One friend of mine refused to ever approach these elusive beasts, however. According to her, a friend of a friend had taken one of these taxis several years back. The friend and her husband were riding in the back when suddenly, the driver stopped on a secluded road and got out of the car to check the tire. Several minutes passed before the husband alighted to check what the problem was, when lo and behold, the driver punched him, jumped back in the car and absconded with the man’s wife.
And she was never seen again! Or maybe she showed up, minus a kidney.
I can’t recall how that particular urban legend ended. This was all part of an illegal organ trafficking scam, my friend assured me, and for that reason, one should never go near these yellow death wagons.
But I wasn’t scared of urban legends, oh no. I was far more afraid of the cacophony of smells and sounds that assailed the senses when travelling by taxi. Over the years, my brain has amassed a vast catalogue of offensive odours and nefarious noises. Cigarette smoke, garlic and fetid body odour are a sure fire recipe for car-sickness, with added bonus points for if the car-sickness manifests itself.
Then the sensory overload becomes really problematic, with the risk of chain-car-sickness-manifestations.
Add to that the blipping and beeping of the 17 iPhones attached to the dashboard, all at full volume, and we are well on the way to a full-blown mental fracture. It wasn’t my kidneys I was worried about. It was my sanity.
Yet, over time, the chaos yields to a certain logic, almost a poetry of motion. The taxi drivers of Nanjing are masters of their domain. If you want to get somewhere fast, hang your head out that window and grab a yellow cab. Nowadays, it is so much easier too.
Didi burst onto the scene in 2012, using GPS to coordinate nearby cabs it allowed smartphone users to contract ride services without taking to the streets or risking bankruptcy. It became accessible through Alipay and WeChat in 2013, and revolutionised transport.
At first, it was simply a matter of securing the elusive taxi without hunting for it in the wild; convenient, but still with its sensory challenges. But then, Did Premier came along, with its swanky black exterior and plush, silent insides, and friends, for the win, working seatbelts!
Gone were the days of sliding up and down the back seat whilst fighting waves of nausea.
These swift and elegant beasts became a stalwart for the sensorily sensitive among us, and now, there are even categories such as Premiere Executive and Luxe, but I have yet to experience the upper echelons of the Didi experience.
Whilst the rise of the Didi phenomenon has impacted the taxi industry, they are holding their own with the multitude of Didi options out there, and the yellow cabs have benefitted from the accountability of app tracing and official taxi licenses necessary nowadays. Gone are the urban legends of organ trafficking. Gone too are the nefarious Black Taxis that operated with nere a license nor a worry in the world.
That said, last week I did jump into the back of a car and tell the driver the last four digits of my phone number, before realising that the driver was not only dressed in pyjamas, but quite perplexed as to what I was doing there. Taxis may evolve, time passes by, but life in Nanjing will always remain interesting.
