Should the Current System of Charging Taxi Rentals be Changed?

While reading Economic Naturalist by Robert Frank, I came across a section that talked about why few taxis can be seen roaming the streets during rainy days. The reason seems simple. Taxi rentals are charged daily and during rainy days, drivers are able to meet their daily targets earlier and therefore, can pack up and go home earlier.

Since this is the case, wouldn’t it be better for taxi rentals to be charged weekly or even monthly if taxi companies want to have more taxis on the roads in rainy days and hence receive fewer complaints from the public. At first sight, this appears to be a very good idea but when we look deeper into the possibility of implementing it, it isn’t as good as we thought because this idea, just like the current system has its own weakness as well.

While the weakness of the current system is that few taxis can be seen roaming the streets during rainy days, the weakness of charging taxi rentals weekly or monthly is that after raking in fortunes on the few rainy days of the month, drivers may decide to just rest at home for the rest of the week or month. This will result in fewer taxis roaming the streets even during non-rainy days.

With the current system, drivers will be forced to work everyday because rentals will be collected at the end of each day. Then again, more intelligent drivers who decide to work extremely hard on rainy days can still overcome the system. But such drivers are probably not many since according to the article, results of a survey showed that drivers would pack up once they reached their daily targets