Taxi — Blog — Healy Chen

Bangkok, part 2

If you think your late evening flight into Suvarnabhumi Airport (BKK) is going to be lonely experience, fret not. Apparently, plenty of flights get into Bangkok rather late. I thought my 11:35 PM arrival time would mean a very quiet immigration and baggage process, but no! Even past midnight, BKK was bustling with the sort of activity you see during midday at a domestic airport in the States. Our flight’s baggage carousel was right next to a flight from Hong Kong. Hello, my people!

Because BKK is still so busy into the morning hours, getting a taxi to your hotel in Bangkok is no trouble. The taxi queue outside of arrivals levels was healthy. Passengers punch in their information at the kiosk. It then spits out a ticket, with which you show to the next available taxi driver. I’ve read a lot of stories of taxi (and tuk-tuk) drivers ripping foreigners off in Thailand, but apparently the airport queue is highly regulated. Drivers are incentivized to treat airport customers fairly, lest they get banned from this lucrative route.

The government can’t risk harming the country’s reputation right off the jump!

I did not take a regular taxi to get to my hotel. Thanks to pre-supplied information, I downloaded the Grab app before leaving America. Grab is essentially the Uber of Thailand (and a few other Southeast Asian countries), and super convenient. It accepts foreign credit cards, so you wouldn’t even need to get cash right away at the airport. At BKK there’s a dedicated Grab pickup zone on the same level as the taxis. At 1:00 AM in the morning, it was lit (to borrow a parlance from the kids). It was so surprisingly busy that there was surge pricing, and my driver actually directed me to a different pickup point.

It ended up costing about 700 Baht to go from the airpot to the Phaya Thai district - where my hotel is. Had it been during “normal” hours, I would have taken the airport rail link. It would have cost only 45 Baht to get to the same Phaya Thai district.

What did we do before?

I recently read about the utter nightmare situation for travelers into LAX: the airport decided to move the pickup location for taxis and rideshare cars away from the arrivals level and to a separate lot some ways away. LAX offers around-the-clock shuttle service to the new pickup lot, from where passengers can wait for their UBER or LYFT drivers, or get in line for the traditional taxi. It’s a move similar to my home airport, SFO: pickups for domestic travel have been moved to a nearby parking garage, though it’s less draconian of a rule than LAX as taxis can still pickup passenger at curbside.

Of course, the decision made by SFO has cascading effect for UBER and LYFT drivers as it created a brand-new traffic queue right out into the northbound exit of highway 101. The congestion problem created by the enormous amount of rideshare cars is still there, it simply moved to a different location - away from the terminals. I do wonder if if that was the original intent by SFO.

It’s no surprise then that the same situation resulted in LAX. A dedicated lot for rideshare may sound good on paper, but the sheer passenger volume is so great that UBER and LYFT cars and taxis are stuck in line for more than an hour just to get in the lot. As it is in SFO, moving the pickup point doesn’t really solve the main issue - too many people waiting for rides - other than punting it elsewhere. Again, maybe that is LAX’s goal: at least the terminals are nice and free-flowing, a sort of quality tax on passengers who rely on rideshare to take get them to their final destination.

Whether that seems fair or not is up to you.

This newfound malaise in our airports caused by the advent of UBER and LYFT asks the question: what did we all do before? The people hailing rideshare cars: did they take taxis before UBER was a thing? Or was it a combination of that and calling in favors from friends or family for a ride? Personally, I’ve always been the latter, even with the convenience of rideshare making it super easy to call my own ride. That said, the emergence of rideshare definitely shifted the passenger load from other modes of transportation, modes that previous have not caused the insane level of congestion we are seeing now. Taking rideshare is such an attractive option for travelers, but the existing infrastructure was not meant to accommodate essentially everyone calling their own taxi.

And what happens when UBER or LYFT - some would say inevitably - go bust? What are people going to do for transport now that we’ve all become accustomed to rideshare? Both companies are losing over billion dollars every quarter, with no prospects of profitability in sight. These companies aren’t necessarily too big to fail, but would they be too ubiquitous to fail? I think we’ll find out this answer sooner or later.