There is not real taxi monitoring service in Kuwait. Like the RTA in Dubai, every taxi driver fears the RTA, they have a lot of power on each individual taxi or the company as a whole. In Kuwait its only the police and no real monitoring from other authorities. For the past several months Abdelfatah has been taking licenses away from expats and blaming expats for the traffic when in reality it is the government employees who are causing 90% of the traffic. Their solutions never tackle the root of the problem because they don’t want to knock on the road doors, they want to make it seem like they are taking action in the public’s eye.

Now lets tackle the Taxis in Kuwait, most of them run without their meters, and they carry multiple passengers over many stops without a questions. When in reality it should be from point A to point B with the meter running. They make up values and charges as they see fit. There are a lot of Taxis in Kuwait and there is a need for them, but a bit too many from what I have seen.

A majority of the Taxi companies in Kuwait are owned by people working the Ministry of Interior, colleagues of Abdelfatah, that is why they get their way and some of these taxis don’t give a crap the way they drive, they say their boss is a policeman whenever they get into an accident. Most of these Taxi companies have a limit of 30 permits per company, that is the rule that seems to be in place, but in reality they are upwards of 100 taxis, and a few are at 200 taxis. There is a need in Kuwait for proper transportation management, but abuse of this kind seems to be coming from the employees of the Ministry of Interior. If people are complaining about traffic, then this is the beginning of the problem, more Taxis then they are permitted to have, and taxi services are not being supervised or regulated by the right authority to keep the service level up.

I’m all for applying the laws on the books, but you have trouble with that when a large percentage (more then 10%) of the police are illiterate and barely have any knowledge of the law. Then they abuse the power they have against expats because Abdelfatah wants results. But it doesn’t seem like anyone is tackling the Taxis which is one of the main problems at hand.