What happened to Malaysia's Taxi system?

I remember those days when I take taxi few years back, they charged at pretty reasonable rate, or follow the meters. Just recently, I found that the taxi driver started to charge at random rate. From a place to another, different taxi's cost could be different up to 100% margin. How can that be?

It seems like nowadays the taxi driver could charge at any price that they want. Even when they're using the taxi meter, at the end of the destination, they'll mark up the price and charge at a higher rate. This happened when I was on my way to KL Sentral early March for an oversea trip. From my house to KL Sentral, the meter says about RM22 but at the end, the taxi driver charge me RM27 instead. Not to mention I have to pay all the toll fees that the taxi driver pass by! When I returned from my oversea trip, take taxi from same place, they charged at RM35!

Some people tells me the taxi driver used to do that to foreigners only, but nowadays, they do it to anyone, and surprisingly, happened in anywhere too. From KL to PJ, not sure about other places, these are the area where you can get taxi charge at random rate. I was wondering what happened to Malaysia's taxi system? Aren't there any cost control on this? This is really putting our country's service to a shame to have such unethical charging just simply the taxi drivers feels like it.

With that, everyone now are encouraged to find out roughly what charging will be from a place to another in order to negotiate with the taxi driver and not to get charge at unreasonable rate. For a local like me that doesn't take taxi that much already feel the frustrating, don't mention those who really need the taxi services. What can we do? Is it something the government could look into?

What do you think?