Life on the Spot! Life and Leisure in Doha, Qatar

We survived a week without our car, mostly by staying home and booking a taxi-ride with Karwa whenever we had to. Our booking with Karwa was mainly as my husband's service going to and coming from work. However, on the second day of our booking, his taxi failed to come as the driver picked up the wrong passenger. Luckily, a colleague of my husband who lives in our area happened to passed by him on the road and gave him a lift to work. Today, however he didn't have a booking in the morning as he had observed in the past that a lot of Karwa cabs pass by the area early in the morning. On the other hand, I made a booking for Xiane and I last Thursday since we had decided for her to go to school that day. My booking was at 7am but the taxi came 10 minutes later. The same thing happened in the afternoon, my ride came about 15-20 minutes late. The driver blamed the dispatching strategy that the office is using. He was telling us that the dispatching has a lot of flaws and by the looks of it, seems that it really does. If not, taxis would be coming right on time and not miss their bookings. I even heard that another passenger had to cancel after the cab failed to come on time.

Having hired the taxi for an hour gave me enough time to talk to the driver. I learned that the Karwa taxi drivers earn much less (QR1200) than the bus and limousine drivers (QR2000 and QR1800 respectively), that is about QR40/day for 10-11 hours of driving. I feel sorry for these drivers who had to work as hard and yet get much less.

I guess, Karwa, as a the leading and the only public transport company here in Qatar has a lot of improving to do, with their operating system but as well as the way they treat their employees. They should find more ways to make their operations more efficient or else it would be a shame that it is the only public transport company in the country.