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Abstract:
For many emerging and developing countries, urbanization and demographic changes require
a remodelling of transportation systems and networks. Paratransit, with its demand
responsive characteristics of being fully flexible, often represents the backbone of the
transport sector while being an informal and, therefore, fairly unorganised system with little
knowledge about working routines of its workers. As an example, this paper analyses the
minibus taxi industry in South Africa based on data from Rustenburg, a mid-sized city, to gain
valuable insights into the working behaviour of minibus taxi drivers by taking an evidencebased
and data-based approach. Therefore, the principle of reference-dependent preferences
is applied to the data to investigate the labour supply choice of taxi drivers, since sheer profit
maximization has proven inadequate for the analysis here. Results indicate, that working
hours for South African minibus taxi drivers are likely to be in the 10–12 h bracket with a
revenue-dependent additional hour accounting for the revenue performance of that day. As a
main finding however, South African minibus taxi drivers cannot clearly be attributed to either
reference dependence or profit-maximization behaviour.
