130,000 Drivers Short: Russia's Taxi Market Heads Into Year-End With a Deepening Deficit

The shortage of taxi drivers on the Russian market may grow to 130,000 by the end of 2024, forecasts Anton Petrakov (Антон Петраков), director for government relations at Yandex Taxi (Яндекс Такси). A year earlier, at the end of 2023, Yandex (Яндекс) analysts estimated the gap at 80,000 drivers. The deficit is now the defining constraint of Russia's urban passenger transport, and it is tightening exactly when seasonal demand peaks.

A deficit that doubled in a year

The arithmetic of the shortage is simple and uncomfortable: from 80,000 missing drivers at the end of 2023 to a projected 130,000 by the end of 2024. Petrakov presented the forecast during a session at the Eastern Economic Forum (EEF-2024), which gives the number an official character: it is the platform's own estimate, delivered publicly to regulators and the industry.

The causes he named are structural rather than cyclical. The deficit is growing, among other things, because of tightening migration policy and regulation in taxi: drivers are moving to other spheres where incomes are comparable but requirements and costs are lower. In other words, the profession is losing people not to a better-paid rival inside taxi, but to adjacent work with a lighter compliance load - a flow that wage subsidies alone struggle to reverse.

From driver shortage to fare pressure

The shortage of drivers, in turn, influences the pricing of rides, especially at the end of the year, Petrakov noted. That is the transmission mechanism of the whole story: a labour gap becomes a supply gap, a supply gap becomes queueing and surge pricing, and queueing becomes the consumer's experience of a regulatory and migration story that never mentions fares.

How the platform is paying for supply

The service itself constantly increases subsidies to attract drivers to the platform, investing a substantial percentage of Taxi turnover, a Yandex representative said on the earnings call for the second quarter. Turnover of the Taxi segment is not disclosed separately; the turnover of Yandex's Ridetech segment - which includes taxi as well as carsharing and scooter rental - grew 45% in 2023 and reached 1.1 trillion rubles. Against a base of that size, a substantial percentage is a material line of defence for driver supply, and also a measure of how expensive the deficit has become.

Two experiments against the deficit

Urban passenger carriage standing for the taxi fleet that lacks tens of thousands of drivers

Beyond money, the platform is trying to widen the funnel of who can drive and under what rules:

New carriage models: the service is trying to restore the inflow of drivers through the introduction of different transport models, including intercity rides, which change the economics of a shift for drivers outside dense urban cores.
A new legal perimeter: Yandex is discussing with regulators the question of a new experimental legal regime for taxi, a sandbox in which part of the compliance load could be restructured rather than merely subsidised.

Both tracks acknowledge the same diagnosis: the deficit is produced by rules and borders as much as by wages, so it can only be partially bought back with subsidies.

What to watch into year-end

The end-of-year peak is the stress test. If the 130,000 forecast materialises while seasonal demand rises, fare pressure will concentrate in exactly the weeks when consumers feel it most; if subsidies and intercity models hold supply, the deficit will show up as platform cost rather than consumer price. Either way, the number Petrakov put on the record - 130,000 against 80,000 a year earlier - is the cleanest single indicator of how Russia's regulated urban mobility market is absorbing its new rules.