Regulate taxi-motos

Editor RE: “Motorcyclist violates traffic rules, causes commotion in town” (The New Times, January 14). This taxi-moto business in Rwanda should be highly regulated, and if/where necessary banned. The conduct by many of them has over the years not helped but continued to instill fear in some of us. They are always catalysts for trouble within and around Kigali. Seriously, something has to be done, before it gets too late. I know it is good business by some well-meaning operators who are feeding their families off the business but when it comes to security, compromises have to be made. DevRwa ********************* These taxi-moto operators are lucky that in this country, they have got the government on their side, they are sensitised to organise themselves into associations and cooperatives and have been beneficiary to different government programmes. In other developing countries, they do not have this working environment; they will be dealing with a corrupt police, high level of theft of their motorcycles, unfriendly customers and so on. Yesterday I was a witness to an interaction between a police officer and a taxi-moto operator after a near miss accident involving my taxi-moto rider and the police officer’s car. To my surprise, the mood was so friendly, exchange of words was so calm, and the whole incident ended smoothly. In any other developing country, in such a situation you can expect beatings, asking for bribe, confiscation of documents or even the motorcycle itself to name but a few. Dieudonne ********************* The demonstration by taxi-moto operators after the incident in town shows how errant these operators are. Just like we always see, something small happens on a road and the first people on the scene are these moto operators each with their own conclusion of what has happened even though none of them was there when it happened. And this is why during the incident in town, all of them jumped to the conclusion that their colleague had been assaulted by the police officer and they went ahead to demonstrate across entire town, disrupting business in the Central Business District. Personally, I have not been one to support the barbarianism demonstrated by some of these people over the years much as there are some that are honest in their ranks. Bimawuwa

Opinions

Regulate taxi-motos