Wednesday 17 September 2008

In Defence of Touts

Picture this: you arrive at a busy, rather decrepit looking airport. You haven’t got your flight yet, so you are trying to buy a ticket back home. Looking up, you expect to see a board showing the departure times, flights and check-in counters of all the planes leaving today. Instead, all you see are flickering lights and paint peeling off the walls. In front of you are 40 different sales counters, each staffed by one person waving to you enthusiastically to book your flight ticket with his or her company. You have never heard of 90% of the companies. They are waving at you even though they don’t even know where you’re going.

Substitute the words ‘airport’ for ‘terminal’ and ‘flight’ or ‘plane’ for ‘bus’, and you get a picture of what happens daily at our bus terminals across the land, from Puduraya to Larkin to Sungai Nibong.

Is it any wonder that touts flourish in such conditions? A Malay daily reported recently that bus ticket touts can earn up to RM5,000-6,000 a month, despite the job being illegal. Typically, they earn RM200 a day, from commissions of RM2 to RM5 paid for by the bus companies. That tells you something, doesn’t it? The powers that be may hem and haw and tell passengers not to buy from touts, but the fact that they can have such decent earnings means that there is a real need and demand for them, from both the passengers and the bus companies themselves!

It’s always the same story. You arrive at the bus station, a little stressed because you want to catch as early a bus as possible. You’re possibly tired, and the prospect of combing through the different stalls looking for the right bus at the right time to the right destination puts you off. The young man who approaches you asking you “ke mana? Singapore? Penang?” could be either a lifesaver or a scammer – your inclination to buy a ticket from him depends on how knowledgeable, tired or desperate you are. Whatever the case, he promises to lead you to the right company, using the best bus, leaving at the best time. So you take your chance with him. What happens next depends on your luck and the honesty of your tout.

Nature, politics and markets all share a same trait – they all abhor a vacuum. If a need is not met, or is met badly, by the government and its regulatory agencies, you can expect private sector agents to provide an immediate alternative. A tout earns his living on the basic inefficiencies of the agencies and terminals regulating and facilitating bus transport – their inability to provide good infrastructure (clean, well-lit, comfortable terminals which are pleasant to wait in) and basic information (departure and arrival times) to match willing customers and eager bus companies. Since they can’t, or won’t do it, the tout assumes their place, a one-man matcher of supply and demand.

Before companies can engage in marketing, the markets themselves have to function effectively. It says something about the market for bus travel in Malaysia where one of the chief strategies of some bus companies is to engage armies of young men to sell their tickets illegally. Sure, most of these companies are using the touts to bypass the terminals (and their surcharges) altogether and pick up their customers on the roadside, but think about it: what is Puduraya providing anyway? A clean, organised, well-lit, airconditioned environment, with plenty of seating? If it was, these touts wouldn’t have any business.

To prove the point, look at those bus companies plying the direct KL-Singapore route - they generally avoid stopping at Puduraya and have online or phone ticketing services available; that is, they built their own infrastructure in the absence of it being available for them.

So touts are here to stay, as long as Puduraya remains Puduraya (dark, dingy, hot) and transport regulators have other agendas other than the efficient matching of buyers and sellers in mind. Perhaps we should just legalise touting and regulate them – after all, we only want them to be honest so that customers don’t get duped or led around in circles or get made to wait longer than is necessary.

Sounds wacky? Apparently, its about as wacky as the idea of a big screen showing consolidated bus departure and arrival times…


Printed in theSun, September 17th, 2008. PDF version here.