Taxi associations from all three regions call for help from the Prime Minister, requesting to consider Uber and Grab as taxis.

According to this document, if the trial continues without amending Decision 24, the taxi system will disintegrate. Currently, in Ho Chi Minh City alone, half of the member taxi units have disintegrated, the remaining units have reduced the number of vehicles by 30%. Hanoi has also reduced the number of taxi vehicles by over 35%.

Three taxi associations petitioned the Prime Minister to direct the Ministry of Transport to stop increasing the number of vehicles currently operating on the pilot because there are too many. Do not expand to provinces and cities outside the pilot scope. Grab and Uber must be passenger transport businesses (taxi booking online), so they must sign contracts directly with drivers and be responsible for resolving any problems with customers and fully fulfill their obligations to the state budget.

At the same time, it is necessary to build a separate identification system for pilot vehicles, these businesses must place servers in Vietnam to connect with state management agencies...

Taxi associations of all three regions proposed to stop the number of pilot vehicles.

According to taxi associations, the Ministry of Transport deliberately failed to limit the number of vehicles participating in the pilot, even though the People's Committees of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City had repeatedly proposed and requested to control the number, leading to the number of pilot contract vehicles increasing rapidly, to 60,000 vehicles.

In Hanoi, there are currently 19,265 taxis and about 30,000 contract vehicles operating as taxis, far exceeding the city's taxi planning (by 2020 Hanoi will have 25,000 vehicles but currently there are over 49,000 vehicles). Similarly, Ho Chi Minh City currently has 11,060 taxis and about 33,000 contract vehicles operating as taxis (Ho Chi Minh City's planning until 2020 has 12,700 vehicles but currently there are over 44,000 vehicles).

The Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, and Da Nang Taxi Associations also said that, according to the pilot plan, vehicles will be given their own logos to distinguish them, but the Ministry of Transport has assigned Uber and Grab to create and issue their own logos. These businesses have not provided identification standards, making it impossible for traffic inspectors to recognize them, and the management agency has no idea of ​​the official number of vehicles.

In addition, in some localities, although not yet licensed to operate, such as Da Nang, Uber and Grab are still operating illegally.

Continuing to emphasize the loss of revenue to the state budget, the Taxi Associations of Hanoi, Da Nang and Ho Chi Minh City said that, with the number of vehicles reaching more than 60,000, the budget contribution of both Uber and Grab during nearly 4 years (2014 to October 2017) was only 285 billion VND, equivalent to 9 months of 2017 of Vinasun taxi company, while the number of Vinasun vehicles was more than 5,000 vehicles.

“If calculated according to the tax rate that taxi businesses have to pay, the tax amount is 163 billion VND/month and 1,963 billion VND/year. With 25% of the revenue that Uber and Grab enjoy, each year the cash flow from the country to foreign countries for Uber and Grab is about 5,400 billion VND, 15 billion VND/day,” the document said.

In addition, many legal gaps also make it difficult to ensure customers' rights, and many incidents have occurred recently related to Uber and Grab.

This “error”, according to the above taxi associations, was due to the misidentification of Uber and Grab as companies providing ride-hailing software instead of being considered taxis. The Ministry of Transport did not foresee the consequences of piloting new technology, did not clearly stipulate a mechanism for handling violations, only penalized Vietnamese partners, while Uber and Grab stayed out.