Beside the more obvious boost to sports, culture and infrastructure, the YOG have brought farther reaching, though less blatant consequences to Nanjing’s most comfortable mode of public transportation.
Due to the Youth Olympics, currently running at full speed, and the masses coming to Nanjing from all over the world, a lot of stress is being put on public transportation. In order to make sure that everything would run smoothly during the Games, the city’s public transport network has been considerably expanded to include additional underground and bus lines, an all new Nanjing tram system and a large number of new taxis. But who is driving all those taxis?
A hint; it’s not Nanjingers. “With all the extra cars, but not enough drivers at hand, the Nanjing taxi company in cooperation with the government have been running a huge campaign in order to attract taxi-driving talent from all over the country by placing adds on popular job searching sites such as Zhaopin”, tells us Zhang Weifeng, one of the few truly local drivers left on Nanjing’s streets these days. “As a result, I am convinced there are now more ‘waidi’ drivers from out of town than there are local ones.”
“I have come here because of the Youth Olympics”, confirms David Chao, who has recently arrived in Ning from Dongguan, the scene of a recent scandal relating to shady services. “There is no money to be made in Dongguan anymore,” he goes on. “But Nanjing; that is a different story.”
The influx of non-local drivers, while providing sorely needed job opportunities, comes with its own set of challenges. As Nanjing is not their hometown, the men and women who come here from as close as Yancheng and as far as Guangdong province, do not know the city and therefore have to rely entirely on GPS, which as we all know can go terribly wrong.
And so it can happen that a taxi ride that should have taken 20 minutes and cost around ¥25 ends up being twice as long and expensive, since the navigation system sends the driver on the less jammed, but considerably farther route. In our case, the taxi driver apologized and let us simply pay the amount we deemed appropriate; but not everyone is that lucky.
The main issue that arises with taxi drivers not knowing their turf during an international sporting event is fairly obvious; how should foreigners who do not speak the local language explain to a driver, who does not know the streets of Nanjing, where they are going? It is quite simply the blind driving the blind.
All one can do, unless one knows the exact way and is capable of explaining it in fluent Mandarin (or Cantonese) to the person behind the steering wheel, is pray that the GPS is in a good enough mood to get you to your destination. Or take the metro instead.
