Anyone who's ever waited for a taxi in Skopje at rush hour or paid more than the meter showed knows the sector has been in chaos for ages. Now even the taxi drivers themselves admit it out loud: there's a shortage of vehicles, the meters are wildly rigged, and people drive around the city without licences.

The Skopje Taxi Drivers' Association lists a whole string of systemic problems - on top of the vehicle shortage and the manipulated meters, there are illegal drivers, off-the-books workers, and the restriction on vehicles older than 2011 introduced without a reasonable transition period. „The conditions are tied to the Euro 4 environmental standard, but the way it's being handled now isn't good," said the association's president, Sasho Rajchanovski.

The demands on the authorities are concrete: stricter inspection control, changes to the transport laws that would require licensed drivers in regular employment, and checks on the taxi companies by the financial authorities. In other words, order where for years there's been a free-for-all - and the bill for that free-for-all is paid by the passenger, with an expensive ride and dubious safety.

The drivers are also announcing protests in the coming days. And here's the paradox the Balkan citizen knows all too well: those who are inside the chaos are now asking the state to bring order, while that same state spent years looking the other way as the problem grew. The question isn't whether Skopje has a problem with taxis - everyone knows that - but why it took a protest for anyone in the institutions to listen at all.