Walk down to any taxi stand in Mong Kok this week and you'll see it: a line of red cabs, half of them with the "for hire" light off because nobody's driving them. Hong Kong has about 18,000 taxi licences, fixed since the 1990s, and they're not spread among 18,000 drivers hustling to make a living. A chunk of them sit with owners who never touch a steering wheel. They lease the car and the licence to whoever will drive a shift, collect the rent, and go home. Meanwhile every uncle you talk to says the same thing: nobody young wants this job anymore, so the fleet just gets older and thinner while everyone quietly books a private car through an app instead.

So the government says it's cracking down. Fine. But crack down on what, exactly? If you go after the undocumented ride-hail drivers, you're squeezing the exact workaround Hong Kong people built because the taxi trade stopped serving them properly. If you actually touch the licence-holding side, the people renting out plates they've never sat behind, that's a real fight, because those licences trade like property and everyone who owns one is banking on the scarcity staying exactly as fixed as it's been for thirty years. My money says the crackdown lands on the driver checking his phone for a fare, not the guy who owns forty plates and has never once said "M記快餐" to a passenger.