The Taxi Phenomenon in Singapore

It's been years since I was last in Singapore. Last night I experienced what I would call the "taxi phenomenon" in Singapore. M & I decided to go to Vivocity for dinner at the Serenity Spanish Restaurant. After a delicious meal of paella and tapas, we decided to head back to the hotel. We followed the taxi signs in the mall. As we had no trouble catching a taxi there, we did not expect any difficulties for our return journey. After all, we saw a long line of taxis queuing for passengers when we were dropped off. Boy,were we in for a surprise!

Once we were outside, we saw people scattered around the curb, sticking their heads out looking out for taxis. There were a couple of taxis, which had the hired signs on without passengers. We were puzzled. So, we asked someone where the taxi queue was and was told it was further ahead. Later in the queue, we discovered from a local in the line that the taxis we saw earlier were pre-booked. We soon learnt the hard way why people pre-book the taxis - after one hour of being in the queue, which by all intents and purposes wasn't really that long, the lack of available taxis at 9.30 pm became very clear to us. As visitors to the country, we were caught unaware by this phenomenon. We were so desperate that we even considered taking the limousine across the taxi queue. The $40 quote stopped us. The wait - 1 hour, the journey - 10 minutes.

The question is - does the lack of taxis at the stands cause more pre-booking or does the increase in pre-booking perpetuate a shortage of taxis at the stands? Or maybe, they just feed each other. Whatever the answer, I have now programmed the phone number of a taxi company on my phone - just in case!