Blue dot taxi system in the Western Cape : systems and technology overview

Abstract

The Western Cape Department of Transport and Public Works (DTPW) initiated the Blue Dot Taxi pilot project to encourage, monitor, and reward behaviour change in the minibus taxi (MBT) industry through an incentive programme for compliant participants. The incentive is determined by the participant’s performance against specified standards designed to improve road safety and service quality for passengers and the broader public. To enable this, each participating taxi is fitted with hardware, including a telematics device and a driver tag. This hardware links the taxi and driver to the incentive system, which routinely checks that compliance requirements have been met and measures performance of the participants against the standards. Participants are enrolled via a registration portal, and their vehicles are inspected using a purpose-built depot application. Compliance checks include daily eNatis and operating licence validity checks, amongst others. All this information feeds into the Intelligent Transport Solution, which monitors and measures performance through a Business Intelligence platform, and calculates incentive payments. Passengers can also rate taxis via WhatsApp and USSD and report incidents, which automatically impacts the incentive calculation and improves accountability of participating MBT services. The government-owned technology is easily scalable and has been successfully used to reduce instances of speeding and harsh driving, and improve passenger perception.