Ask a taxi driver in Sham Shui Po how business is and he'll laugh at you first, then tell you the real answer. There are about 18,000 taxi licences in this city and there have been about that many for years. Meanwhile everyone's phone has three ride-hailing apps on it, half the drivers on those apps aren't supposed to be driving for hire at all, and the government has now said, officially, it's going after them. Chief Executive John Lee's five-year plan, out this week, leans hard on "regulation" and "order." Translate that from policy-speak: they're finally going to check who's actually driving you home.

Here's the bit nobody says out loud. Those 18,000 licences aren't just permission slips, they're assets, and some of them changed hands for over HK$5 million each back when the market was hot. Somebody paid real money for a fixed number of plates. Now the government wants to clean up the drivers working around that fixed number, which sounds fair, until you ask who benefits when the alternative gets squeezed out. A crackdown on the black market Uber drivers isn't just tidiness. It's also a pretty good deal for whoever's still holding a medallion.