Tulum's Taxis Are Getting Fare Boards, Cameras and a New Terminal

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The Tiburones del Caribe taxi union has begun installing printed fare boards at the places passengers actually get into cars, and the point of them is narrow and useful: the price stops being something you negotiate after you arrive. “Vamos a exhibir todos los tarifarios y vamos a trabajar con transparencia,” the union's general secretary said in July, announcing that every fare schedule would be displayed publicly. That single change addresses the complaint visitors in Tulum raise more than any other.

The boards are going up at supermarkets, at the bus terminal, at the union's main base and at the public spaces where people board. They are being manufactured now and await municipal authorisation for placement, and they are being rolled out in phases, starting with the long-distance vans before extending to local vans and to taxis. The immediate trigger is easy to find in local reporting: residents describing fares as high as 400 pesos for a short run between the Chedraui supermarket and La Veleta, a trip of a few minutes.

An app was the workaround. This is the institution.

When we wrote about this in September 2025, the story was Eiby, a Mexican-built app offering fixed fares, driver verification and live trip tracking. The interesting line in that piece was not about the app at all. It was the observation that authorities had run enforcement campaigns on taxi pricing for years and the problems had persisted, which is why a private product had room to exist in the first place.

What has changed since is that the state has stopped leaving it to the market. In February, Imoveqroo, the state mobility institute, sat down with the union and the municipality together. The people in the room were Renan Enrique Pérez y Pérez, Imoveqroo's delegate in Tulum, Josué Chimal Chimal, the municipal mobility director, Yessica Orozco, the municipal transit director, and Manuel Enrique Solís Alcocer, the union's general secretary. What came out of it was a list of physical changes rather than an appeal for better behaviour: cameras in the cars, digital payment, better organised taxi ranks, newer vehicles, and translation apps for passengers who do not speak Spanish.

One hundred taxis fitted with video surveillance cameras are entering service. That number is worth holding onto, because it is the sort of measure that is announced often and delivered rarely, and it is small enough to be checkable.

A terminal in La Veleta

The largest piece of it is not a taxi at all. Imoveqroo is building a Terminal Foránea, a long-distance terminal, for the union in La Veleta, and Rafael Hernández Kotasek, the institute's director, has described the site as one that could become a transfer centre organising vehicle and passenger flows across the central region. He reviewed the works in February alongside Diego Castañón Trejo, Tulum's municipal president. A new Imoveqroo delegation building in the town is part of the same expansion.

That is a substantial piece of transport infrastructure landing in a residential neighbourhood, and it is worth being straight about what that means rather than filing it under progress and moving on. A regional transfer centre makes La Veleta materially better connected, which over time tends to matter to anyone living there without a car. It also brings coach movements, waiting passengers and traffic to streets that did not have them. Both of those are true at once, and which one dominates depends on details of the design and routing that have not been published.

What this does and does not prove

It does not prove the fares themselves are coming down. A displayed tariff makes a price knowable, which is a different thing from making it lower, and the boards do not yet have municipal authorisation to go up. Nor is there a published completion date for the terminal, for the camera rollout, or for the digital payment systems. The programme has named officials and physical objects attached to it, which puts it well ahead of an announcement, but it is still mostly in progress.

What it does prove is that ground transport has moved from a complaint to a workstream with budgets and named people behind it. That matters more than it sounds. Tulum's own reporting on its airport has repeatedly identified the cost and friction of getting between the terminal and the town as one of the specific things holding the destination back, alongside security and sargassum. Plan Tulum Renace, published in the federal gazette in July, committed to improving exactly that connection, along with a parking hub at the south access to the Jaguar Park and a new public transport scheme for the town. The taxi measures are the visible end of a larger reorganisation.

For anyone who owns a home here and lets it, the practical read is simple enough. The single most common thing a guest complains about in Tulum is what it cost them to get from the airport to the door, and a printed tariff at the boarding point is the cheapest possible fix for it.

Sources: Imoveqroo coordination meeting with the Tiburones del Caribe union and the Tulum municipality, 4 February 2026. Imoveqroo infrastructure review in Tulum, Coordinación General de Comunicación, Government of Quintana Roo, 25 February 2026. Taxi union fare board announcement as reported by Quintana Roo Hoy, 24 July 2026. Plan Tulum Renace, Diario Oficial de la Federación, 17 July 2026.