SINGAPORE — Comfort will pass on the savings from the newly-announced road tax rebate to their taxi drivers, the company said today.

Comfort, the largest taxi operator with almost 16,300 cabs here, said that the road tax rebate works out to nearly S$5 million in savings a year for the company, or S$306 per taxi per year. It said that all the savings will be passed on to their drivers.

This statement comes after the National Taxi Association (NTA) today welcomed the one-year, 30-per-cent road tax rebate for commercial vehicles, including taxis, announced by the Government yesterday in the Budget 2013, and urged operators to pass on the full savings to taxi hirers.

In a statement, the NTA noted that operators like Comfort and SMRT passed on the savings to drivers in 2009 when a similar road tax rebate was announced by the Government, and expressed its appreciation of the gesture.

“Likewise for this year, we hope that taxi operators can continue this goodwill. We strongly urge all taxi operators to once again pass on the total savings from the road tax rebate to taxi hirers,” said NTA President Wee Boon Kim.

“The amount will help greatly in relieving some of the financial burden that comes with rising business operation costs for this group of self-employed taxi drivers. More importantly, we believe that such gesture would be much appreciated by the taxi drivers.”

The NTA is an association for all Taxi Drivers in Singapore with more than 13,000 members currently, and comes under the National Trades Union Congress (NTUC) federation of trade unions in the industrial, service and public sectors here.