Shenzhen Airport experiences difficulty hailing taxis in the early morning—how to break through the city's "first barrier"

As the night deepened, a series of overnight passenger jets landed smoothly, while alongside the massive flow of people streaming toward Shenzhen Bao’an International Airport’s various exits was not only the hope of getting home, but also the late-night taxi-hailing dilemma that would occasionally play out.

Passengers going to the ride-hailing area to hail a car

At 1:00 a.m., Mr. Li, a resident, dragged his rolling suitcase along beneath an elevated roadway, walking beside a roaring stream of traffic. At the airport—only a dozen or so kilometers from his home—he had just gone through a taxi-hailing “tug-of-war” that lasted a full hour. After exiting Door 15, lacking any experience hailing a cab at that hour, he went straight to Ride-hailing Zone A, watching the price surge from 20 yuan to more than 80 yuan on the app, while the radar on the screen kept spinning uselessly with “We’re trying to get you a ride.” “I was a bit panicked then, and I wasn’t familiar with the area. I couldn’t find the taxi waiting area.” In the end, he took what was a slightly risky approach—walking two kilometers to the underpass at the airport’s outer edge—and spent 29 yuan to get a ride home.

Following Mr. Li’s steps, a reporter from Nandu conducted an in-person visit late at night to investigate why the “last mile” is repeatedly complained about by travelers.

Hard to find cars with surge pricing; increased late-night travel anxiety from cars and people mixing together

At Shenzhen Bao’an International Airport after midnight, the scene is still busy: jet bridges and the terminal buildings remain brightly lit, while suitcase wheel sounds, conversations, and flight announcements blend into one. Electronic screens scroll with flight arrival information. Transportation direction signs mark the boarding areas for taxis, ride-hailing, and airport buses, and staff weave through the crowd to guide people.

Midnight airport

After waiting and visiting in Shenzhen Airport’s ride-hailing Zones A and B, the Nandu reporter found that the pedestrian passage leading from Door 15 to the parking area intersects with the vehicle access lane for ride-hailing Zone A, creating a cross-intersection that results in cars and people mixing, and disorderly traffic. Travelers drag their suitcases back and forth between lanes; ride-hailing cars crawl slowly within the passage; overall passage is very inconvenient. Multiple passengers said that even if they proactively add a price, they still don’t receive pickup notifications for a long time. “Last time I added 80 yuan. I waited an hour and still no one accepted. In the end, I had to walk out of the airport to hail a taxi.” Passenger Mr. Zhang said that it looks like tonight he won’t be able to get a cab again. Travelers who understand local road conditions choose to walk to the airport’s outer area to hail a car, while first-time visitors from elsewhere in China who come to Shenzhen can only stand where they are and wait.

“I really regret buying a flight that lands late. I didn’t expect it to be this hard to hail a taxi.” Xiao Wang, interning in Shenzhen, said, her voice tinged with exhaustion and grievance. Behind her, many passengers were experiencing the same kind of torment as her and Mr. Zhang: some were anxiously tapping on their phones, some squatted by the roadside scrolling through social platforms’ “airport taxi-hailing攻略,” parents holding their children in their arms paced anxiously in the night wind.

Ride-hailing waiting Zone A

Ride-hailing waiting Zone B

Taxi drivers pick and refuse short trips; ride-hailing markups are hard to break the deadlock

Ride-hailing is hard to hail—why not take a taxi? “Taxis are expensive, and I don’t want to be scolded or get blank stares.” Xiao Xie, who lives in Bao’an, often travels on “red-eye flights.” She told the Nandu reporter that when taxi drivers hear the destination is still within Bao’an, many drivers “complain,” saying they have to wait one or two hours just to get a short-distance order. Besides having to endure drivers’ moods, some drivers even propose extra charges. “The night starting fare is already higher. One driver, just before getting off, proposed an additional 15 yuan on top of the metered price.” After comparing, Xiao Xie found that when departing at the same time—after 12:00 a.m.—from the airport to the Baohaoting residential community where she lives, ride-hailing costs no more than 60 yuan, while after taxi surcharges she has paid as much as 90 yuan.

Payment invoice

Previously, the airport’s “Bao’an Easy Pass” dynamic bus was a boon for short-distance travelers—20 to 30 yuan per person. It was divided by areas such as Xinan, Xixiang, and Fuyong. Passengers from the same area could share a ride and be dropped off, offering high value for money and without having to look at the driver’s face. But in recent visits, when Xiao Xie asked, she was always told “there are temporarily no vehicles in some area” or “the wait time is long.” This便民 service gradually “stopped working.”

Complaints fill social platforms; short-distance travelers become a “group that feels ignored”

The experiences of Mr. Li and Xiao Xie are just a snapshot of the midnight travel taxi-hailing predicament at Shenzhen Airport. When you open a social app and type “Shenzhen airport late-night taxi,” the screen is filled with passengers’ taxi-hailing anxiety.

Passengers waiting for ride-hailing

“Even 12 kilometers at the airport gets you yelled at” “Nanshan Bao’an doesn’t deserve taxis” … Netizens complained one after another, being refused because the distance is close. The ride-hailing lane is also troublesome. A screenshot shared by netizen “momo” shows that at the early-morning airport, the page clearly prompts: “More than 200 people nearby are calling for cars.” She waited for half an hour, repeatedly added calls, and in the end could only use a trick shared by another netizen—after taking an overnight bus and leaving the airport area, she was able to “instantly hail a car.” There were also passengers complaining that after finally getting a ride-hailing car, because the destination was Honglang North in Bao’an, the driver “berated them for the whole way,” saying that at that late hour there was no money to be made.

Passengers waiting for ride-hailing

Some travelers also encounter “expensive taxi-hailing”: a business traveler landed in Bao’an at dawn, paying 160 yuan to reach near Shenzhen Overseas Chinese Town in Nanshan. In normal times, taxis only cost about 90 yuan, while Didi Express only costs 75 yuan.

However, besides all the complaints about how hard taxi-hailing is, a deeper contradiction emerges: a “gap” in public transportation coverage. Although the airport currently offers night express lines like NA1 (Futian Luohu) and T308 (Buji) with fares as low as 25 yuan, which can send long-distance travelers to the city’s core station points, the limitations of these trunk routes are obvious. For short-distance travelers carrying large luggage, traveling with elderly people and children, or with destinations that are not on trunk stations, the “artery” function of buses cannot resolve access to their doorstep. “The bus can only drop me at the China Merchants Bank building. But my home is still three or four kilometers away. After I get off at 3:00 a.m., I still have to face a second round of taxi-hailing.” One traveler’s words summed up the helplessness. It is precisely the absence of last-stop public transportation service that forces a large number of short-distance travelers—who could have been absorbed by micro-circulation buses—back into the taxi-hailing market, breaking the already fragile supply-and-demand balance at the airport late at night.

Drivers’ economic ledgers: “Long-distance orders are more cost-effective”

In fact, the difficulty of taxi-hailing at the airport late at night is not truly a lack of capacity in the real sense; it’s more a structural imbalance caused by drivers’ selective order picking. In Shenzhen Airport’s designated ride-hailing parking lot P4, a driver who often “waits for work” at the airport told reporters the reality: entering the airport to queue can easily take one or two hours. During that time, not only is there no revenue, but drivers still have to pay parking fees on the clock. For the P4 ride-hailing area, within 30 minutes it is free; the first hour costs 3 yuan; after the first hour, it costs 1 yuan per half hour; and the maximum charge per day is 25 yuan. “Add up those two hours—no earnings at all down to the last dime. You definitely wouldn’t want to accept a short trip for just dozens of yuan.”

Driven by profit, cross-city long orders to Guangzhou, Huizhou, Zhuhai, and so on—often costing several hundred yuan—became the only hope that kept drivers guarding the dark night. They avoid short orders as if they were a nuisance. The drivers’ calculations are, at their core, to balance queue time costs plus parking costs against actual income. When reporters asked whether drivers’ willingness to take short orders would increase if the airport could achieve “free parking within three hours,” one driver said plainly: “It wouldn’t help. Long-distance orders are still more cost-effective.”

Economic calculation by ride-hailing drivers

Rules out of control: technological arbitrage and violations, intensifying market chaos

To grab long orders and avoid short ones, a “cat-and-mouse game” played out late at night. Drivers came up with all sorts of tactics—there are the “trade-offs” in which platform they choose, the abuse of technological means, and their maneuvering around the rules.

Selective acceptance of orders is the most common tactic. Multiple drivers confirmed that because the Didi platform forces assignment (dispatch) of orders, many drivers, as soon as they enter the airport, turn it off, switching instead to platforms where they can choose orders themselves, such as Amap, directly skipping short trips and only snatching long-distance orders.

Beyond selective acceptance, “dropping the fake location” cheating is an open secret inside the industry. Cars and people run orders from the outskirts, yet through the software they lock a virtual location to the very front of the airport’s queuing sequence. Once they get assigned as number one and encounter a short trip, they simply ignore it—let the system dispatch to the next one, while they continue to occupy the first spot waiting for long-distance orders. A ride-hailing driver explained that some drivers’ commonly used “position dumping” method essentially works by modifying the smartphone’s operating system location via software, pushing the location into the airport, while they keep running orders outside. Then, after getting close to the airport, they go in. He added that to evade platform detection, drivers also combine operations—for example, when “dumping the location,” switching to a page where orders can’t be heard (not receiving sound orders), or setting a “super convenient” order by putting the destination somewhere that it is basically impossible for anyone to place an order. That way, they occupy the queue slot, and the platform cannot dispatch orders; then when they are almost at the airport, they cancel the setup to prioritize order acceptance.

Communication between ride-hailing drivers and passengers about pickup location

Compared with these辅助 operations for “dumping the location,” an automatic order-snatching plug-in is even more harmful. According to drivers, the location-dumping software differs from an automatic order-snatching plug-in. Drivers can set the order total price and the per-kilometer rate to achieve automatic order grabbing. Some order-snatchers can also use an all-in-one device to simulate an Android system and use image recognition to identify pick-up and drop-off points to grab orders. Often, drivers who follow the rules haven’t even seen the order before they’re already taken by the plug-in, turning normal queuing into “nothing but wasted effort.” Although relevant platforms have emphasized crackdowns on such plug-ins and have permanently banned violating drivers, the chaos hasn’t been eliminated, and new plug-ins keep appearing.

Aside from plug-ins, experienced drivers will use queuing rules to “cut in”:

“First, enter the airport leaving your spot empty. Take a short order, finish it, and then you get the privilege of priority in the next queue—then you directly jump ahead. It saves a lot more time than normal queueing.”

Some drivers even intentionally delay pressing the “start queue” button. “Hard wait inside the airport for one or two hours, and then press the button. The default waiting time is long. That way you can take short orders and also prioritize grabbing long orders.”

“These tactics are fundamentally about maximizing the ‘monetization’ of queue time.” An industry insider said. To break these kinds of chaos, you can’t rely only on banning accounts; you also need to plug loopholes at the underlying level, such as making the queue page unique and canceling the option to set “order along the route” at stations.

From “rewards” to “punishments”—why is this entrenched problem so hard to solve?

Faced with the difficulty of taxi-hailing late at night and the conflict between drivers and passengers caused by accepting short trips, transportation authorities and the airport are not doing nothing. As early as 2024, Shenzhen Airport launched a taxi “Short-trip No Worries” smart management platform, using “points to waive queue access” to incentivize drivers to accept short trips. In 2026, it also introduced a penalty mechanism in ride-hailing Zone B: “pass within 5 minutes” with a time limit. With “rewards” and “punishments” over two years and two treatments, why couldn’t they cure the lingering sickness of “hard taxi-hailing at night” at Shenzhen Airport? After reporting and visiting, the reporter found that both policies had issues such as “insufficient targeting and poor implementation,” ultimately falling into the awkward situation of “policy running in circles.”

Taking the taxi “Short-trip No Worries” policy as an example: the “Short-trip No Worries” smart management system uses 15 kilometers as the short-trip benchmark distance. For every 1 kilometer less traveled on a taxi short trip, 1 point is earned. For every 10 points, drivers can reserve once the Shenzhen Airport taxi staging lot’s quick-priority access channel. During peak hours, it can save more than 1 hour of queue time. But this policy becomes ineffective in the early-morning hours.

“The quick lane is only open during the daytime, so it’s useless at dawn.” Taxi driver Master Wang said that dawn is the time when passengers find it hardest to hail taxis, and it’s also when drivers have the most resentment toward short-trip orders. At that time, the quick lane is closed, so the points provide no incentive. During interviews, the reporter found that many drivers didn’t know that the short-trip no worries lane had been extended until 8:00 p.m. and still stuck to the trial run period of “10:00—18:00.” There were also drivers who said they would rather take the risk of being complained about and refuse short trips anyway, saying, “Queue time takes several hours. Taking a short trip earns only a couple dozen. It’s simply not worth it.”

More crucially, the constraint strength of the points rules is insufficient. The policy mentions a “blacklist system,” which only restricts drivers’ access and reservation permissions for the short-trip quick-priority channel at Shenzhen Airport, but it cannot prevent drivers from refusing short trips on-site. “If I’m not switching to the quick lane, I can still choose orders anyway. There’s no substantial punishment.” Master Wang said. Most drivers, he added, wouldn’t accept “not worth the effort” short trips just for points.

Compared with taxis’ “choose-and-refuse” behavior, the ride-hailing problem of hard taxi-hailing is more complex, presenting a compounded dilemma of “chaotic lanes” and “platform price pressure.”

Unreasonable lane design; the mixing of people and vehicles is a hard-to-solve “knot.” People and vehicles repeatedly cross paths; congestion is severe during peak times. “At Shenzhen North Station, there are pedestrian skybridges that separate flows. People and vehicles are separated there, but here people squeeze together with cars. Drivers don’t want to come.” Driver Master Chen’s complaint pointed to the lane design’s shortcomings.

Platform price pressure further increases drivers’ tendency to choose orders. A ride-hailing driver complained: “The passenger makes a 50-yuan short trip request. When it reaches our hands, it’s only a little over thirty. Accepting short-trip orders doesn’t make money at all. Who would want to take them?”

The platform commission mechanism is always a core hot topic for the ride-hailing industry. In recent years, the Ministry of Transport has continued to push the “Sunshine Action” for ride-hailing commission, urging platforms to reasonably reduce commission ratios and standardize industry operations and order. Multiple ride-hailing platforms, including Didi and T3, collectively adjusted commission rules.

Based on full-year 2024 data, Didi’s average commission rate across the whole platform stayed stable at 14%. However, some drivers’ actual commission data differs. Several Didi drivers told media that their commission percentage ranged between 10%–29%. “The commission differs per order—roughly between 10% and 25%.” A Didi driver told the Nandu reporter that the commission level among competitors is basically similar, with the highest reaching around 28%.

Even if official data and industry remediation keep releasing goodwill, when it’s applied to the order-acceptance scene at Shenzhen Airport in the early morning, drivers’ take-home income still can’t cover queueing and congestion costs, and their willingness to accept short trips remains strong.

Passengers want convenience; drivers hope for more favorable terms

In interviews, multiple passengers said that Shenzhen Airport’s service is “pretty good,” and that there have been corresponding arrangements and improvements in guaranteeing travel at night. But everyone generally expressed the same request: they hope to be able to get a car smoothly in the early morning, without extra charges, without walking far, and without waiting a long time.

Meanwhile, ride-hailing drivers and taxi drivers both said that “short-trip orders don’t pay” is the core reason for drivers’ selective acceptance. Multiple taxi drivers said they hope the “Short-trip No Worries” policy can be optimized, extending the quick lane’s opening hours into the early morning; ride-hailing drivers hope platforms can reduce commission proportions. In addition, they hope to improve the design of the airport ride-hailing pickup lanes, achieve separation of people and vehicles, and ensure that “once you go in, it won’t be congested; you can connect with passengers more quickly, reduce communication costs, and also increase willingness to accept orders.”

Opinion: Addressing people’s livelihood pain points takes long-term effort; city governance also needs precise action

From opening a midnight bus service (“Midnight Express” at 12:00), then adding more lines covering key areas, optimizing departure intervals and fares to supplement night public transportation supply, to rolling out the taxi “Short-trip No Worries” points system, and then to the ride-hailing lane’s “time-limited 5-minute” snapshot enforcement—there have been measures one after another. But none of them fundamentally solved the problem of hard taxi-hailing at Shenzhen Airport early in the morning.

Many interviewed industry experts pointed out: most prior governance focused on “treating the symptoms,” without touching the systematic underlying stubborn issues behind the predicament—platform algorithms’ “implicit extraction,” the failure of some drivers’ professional standards, and a disconnect between station hardware and management mechanisms.

As Shenzhen is a modern international metropolis, the airport is this city’s “first interface.” When you can’t get a taxi early in the morning and still have to look at the drivers’ faces, it will undoubtedly cool down the expectations of exhausted residents and add to their sense of helplessness. It will also leave a bad impression on out-of-town tourists who are just arriving.

To break the midnight taxi-hailing predicament at Shenzhen Airport, only by tackling the root causes and solving the problem in the deeper waters can this truly resolve a people’s livelihood pain point. Geng Xu, associate professor at the School of Government Management at Shenzhen University, said that the key to solving this predicament is not administrative pressure or moral appeals. Given the essence of market incentives, only “mechanism reshaping and coordinated governance,” achieved through fine-tuned institutional design to realize “incentive compatibility,” so that the demands of drivers, passengers, platforms, and regulators form a joint force, can break the current stalemate. Based on her research experience, she proposed three major directions for targeted measures.

Implement “algorithm regulation” and facilitate government-enterprise data integration to force platforms to shoulder social responsibility

In Geng Xu’s view, the ride-hailing platforms’ dispatching and pricing mechanisms centered on algorithms, with commissions set too high and insufficient nighttime incentives, are the fundamental economic drivers causing drivers to choose orders and refuse short trips. Transportation authorities should not just stay at post-event supervision, but extend governance upstream to the algorithm rule setting. It is recommended to hold joint talks with major ride-hailing platforms and require them to establish a “dedicated dispatch and pricing mechanism” for late-night hub stations. For example, platforms should substantially reduce or even waive commissions on short-trip orders from the late-night airport, transferring profit to drivers to offset queueing costs. Meanwhile, government and enterprises should break down data barriers and establish a unified electronic perimeter for stations, standardize order acceptance behavior across multiple platforms, and compress drivers’ ability to choose orders selectively. More importantly, use algorithms to establish a credit-based reward-and-punishment mechanism bundling long and short orders. Set rules that only drivers who complete a certain number of short-trip orders can unlock permissions to receive high-priority matched long-distance large orders, and use economic levers to guide driver behavior.

Upgrade station hardware and improve policy precision so that “fine management” truly takes hold

“Public policy design cannot be ‘one-size-fits-all.’” Geng Xu said. Existing policies like “Short-trip No Worries” fail in the late-night hours, exposing a disconnect between management mechanisms and real pain points. In terms of hardware environment, it is necessary to retrofit the airport’s ride-hailing transfer area to achieve separation of people and vehicles, and add pedestrian skybridges—using spatial design optimization to relieve congestion.

In terms of policy supply, the opening time of the “Short-trip No Worries” quick lane must be extended to cover the late-night peak when passengers are hailing cars. At the same time, introduce “direct fare relief” tools with real cash to reduce drivers’ sunk costs, fundamentally alleviating drivers’ anxiety and resistance toward short-trip passengers. Even more crucially, optimize public transportation layout, restore and strengthen micro-circulation bus routes and shared-ride services for near-suburb areas such as Bao’an, reducing from the source passengers’ “dependence on taxi-hailing as a necessity.”

Carry out joint law enforcement and credit governance to reshape industry service standards and the moral bottom line

Regarding chaotic behaviors such as plug-ins used to grab orders, surcharging and refusing pickups, and insulting passengers, Geng Xu believes this not only undermines a fair market environment for doing business, but also disrupts the allocation of public resources. Public security cyber police and transportation enforcement departments should conduct cross-department “clean the web and cut the chain” campaigns with platforms to severely crack down on technical arbitrage. At the same time, establish a full-cycle credit evaluation system covering practitioners of both taxis and ride-hailing. For drivers repeatedly verified for refusing pickups, surcharging, and illegally grabbing orders, implement cross-platform joint penalties and include them in industry service blacklists to use hard constraints to uphold the professional bottom line.

Regarding the people’s livelihood pain point of difficulty hailing cars late at night, Huang Zhenhui, a representative to the Shenzhen Municipal People’s Congress, proposed a suggestion from the perspective of public保障. He believes that a combined travel mode of “airport shuttle line + terminal taxi-hailing” could be implemented during the early-morning period. That is, strongly guide short-distance travelers to first take the airport shuttle line or the Bao’an Easy Pass dynamic bus. After leaving the airport’s core area and reaching city drop-off points closer to their destinations, complete the last few kilometers via ride-hailing or taxi.

This approach can both leverage the efficient distribution ability of public transportation to reduce late-night congestion of transportation capacity and empty-run emissions in the airport core area, and aligns better with a green and low-carbon direction. It also releases taxi-hailing demand from the airport’s closed-off zone—where queue costs are far higher than short-trip returns—into more open urban areas with more capacity and more market-based pricing. That way, drivers will no longer refuse short-trip orders due to long queue times, and passengers will no longer be forced to accept surcharges or face cold treatment. Through using shuttling to bypass congestion, it can achieve a win-win outcome where government guidance, market regulation, and citizens benefit together.

The “temperature” of city governance often lives in a streetlight at midnight, and in a car willing to take you home no matter how late it is and no matter how far. How to ensure that there is no “taxi-hailing anxiety” at Shenzhen Airport early in the morning is a test of the wisdom and backbone of those who manage it. Nandu will continue to pay attention to the整改 of the problem of hard taxi-hailing at Shenzhen Airport in the early morning, and track the implementation results of various optimization measures.

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