Mabuhay Taxi to acquire 13 more black units

A LEADING taxi operator in Davao City announced on Monday that it is planning to acquire 13 more black taxi units this month.

Mabuhay Taxi Davao assistant manager Pierre Ryan Tan Davao, speaking at Kapehan sa Dabaw at SM City, said the plan of having Black Taxis in the city is patterned after the high-end concept of vehicle in Singapore.

Tan said they will be acquiring 13 brand-new Nissan Sentra units to add to their 25 Black Taxi units.

Mabuhay’s Black Taxi became a hot topic on the social networking sites Facebook and Twitter in the past few days being the first in the Philippines to use a debit card terminal and a global positioning system (GPS) in its service in the Philippines today.

Tan said all of its Black Taxi units have the GPS, but added only 20 of them have the debit card terminal, a device that lets passengers to pay using a debit card.

"What we're thinking when we decided to equip our taxi with the debit card terminal is to improve convenience, since Davao City is already a safe place," Tan said, referring to the security of his taxi drivers.

The provider of debit card terminal is the China Banking Corporation (Chinabank).

Hudson Uy, area head Mindanao 1 of the Chinabank, clarified that debit card terminal functions just the same as the point-of-sale (POS) terminal being used in many of grocery stores and business establishments in the malls, only that it allows transaction with debit card and not with credit card yet.

"We received inquiries from other companies," he said.

Mabuhay has been in the transportation business for 18 years, and has since acquired over 200 taxi units.

He said the taxi firm will equip its Blue Taxi units with the GPS in the next two to three weeks.

"We have more 100 Blue Taxi units," Tan said.

Using the GPS makes it easy for passenger to call a taxi cab, as most of the locations in Davao are already saved in the database through an automated dispatching.

"If there are phone calls, our computer will give a complete list of taxi drivers who are nearest to the caller. The computer then will send a signal to the drivers whether or not they are available," he said.