It’s very much a seller’s market for taxi drivers in Beijing these days — a dearth of vehicles, epic traffic jams and the cold weather have made catching a cab a free-for-all on the streets.

The problem has reached such epic proportions that now the Ministry of Transportation has been obliged to step in. China Daily reports on new rules aimed at preventing cabbies from arbitrarily refusing to pick up passengers:

Starting on April 1, taxi drivers who, without justification, refuse to take passengers or deliberately take longer routes to increase fares could face fines up to 200 yuan ($32), according to a new regulation by the transportation authority. Taxi drivers could also be fined for pre-arranging a price higher than what the meter would read for the same trip or for dumping passengers in the middle of a trip, according to the regulation on management of taxi driver qualifications, released by the Ministry of Transport on its website on Wednesday. Passengers can file complaints to local transportation authorities, the regulation says.

Sounds great, but the article goes on to skirt around the root cause of this cabbie conundrum: traffic. A few paragraphs down a cabbie is quoted as saying the reason why many drivers don’t stop for passengers is because they need to “take a break or eat a meal” — a most unconvincing argument considering how frequently cabs with their “Available” (空车）signs clearly displayed simply (and seemingly gleefully) have been failing to stop for people desperately attempting to hail them down.

I’ve had a number of “what’s-up-with-that” conversations with cab drivers lately and they all cite the city’s abysmal traffic jams as the main reason they refuse to pick up passengers during rush hours (which is now virtually around the clock). Quite simply cabbies lose time and money (in lost fares and gas) if they pick someone up and end up sitting in traffic for what can be hours at a time. Meanwhile the only people who are actually making any money are the growing number of “black cab” (黑车）drivers (many of whom are former kosher cab drivers) who make a killing shuttling commuters back and forth between residential areas and nearby office complexes for prices that are often double, and even triple, what a licensed cab would charge.

The article also says that the Beijing Municipal Commission has “opened a 24-hour hotline (6835 1150) to hear passenger complaints, and passengers can use cell phones to record their conversations as proof,” which begs yet another question: who in the hell has reflexes fast enough to whip out a recording device for every cab they encounter? And even if you have eagle eyes and a lightning fast memory (to memorize license plate and driver ID numbers), the burden of proof lies on you, dear rider, to provide “proof.”

At best these new rules are an official acknowledgment  of an increasingly deteriorating transportation situation, but without any clearly devised methods of enforcement (and perhaps a sizable taxi fare hike), much less a concrete plan to tackle congestion, you’d be well advised to invest in a bike.