Italy issues a nationwide Uber ban | Hacker News Reader

Italy issues a nationwide Uber ban

theverge.com

19 pointscrivabene24 comments

It's fashionable to hate on Uber these days. But does anyone really want to go back to the bad old days of taxis? No thank you Italy.

What's wrong with taxis? Genuine question. Won't a taxi cab get you to where you need to go just the same? They may not have an app, but you can probably use your phone to call them.

Leaving the bar at 2:00am, trying to find a number for a cab company, calling their dispatch and communicate your location, then you hope the taxi actually shows up (you have no idea how long it will take, or if they actually will show up at all), being pressured to pay in cash because their credit card reader is "broken", and not knowing how much the total will be until you arrive...

There's a huge list of reasons why Uber is nice to have, taxis and Uber are not even close.

where do you live that taxi companies don't have there yet apps? heck wet have already aggregators so you don't need bunch of apps

so what's benefit for user? all i see at Uber is avoiding taxes and breaking competition by ignoring regulation which is why they are not that big in EU

Are you still in 2004?

I'm no fan of Uber but taxis in Rome, Italy, at least, are the worst out of ~40 countries I've been to. And when you write the city to try and complain after photographing the taxi that ripped you off? They basically ask you fill out a novel. :-/

Nothing wrong, I'd love to use taxis. But I have a few conditions:

* I want to call a driver and know if the ride was accepted, if the car is coming, how much time it will take for it to arrive, all in realtime... and specially, I want feedback if the ride is cancelled;

* Not to be called names if the ride was too short;

* Be able to rate the driver and know that anything I complained about would be taken seriously;

* Pay a fair amount for a decent service.

There are a number of taxi companies that are already doing apps and such. I think this is great. I have no such options where I live, therefore... Uber.

Your comment makes me wonder if pure taxi apps like flywheel even kick licensed taxi drivers off the app for having low ratings. It's entirely possible for someone to be a totally shitty driver but still not do anything that gets their licensed revoked by the commissioning authority because it's a purchased asset.

Calling a cab has always sucked for me in San Francisco. Often i couldn't reach a dispatcher, and when I did, they never committed to actually send a cab. Also, cabs are not cheap. These days, if I can't get an UberLyft, I take the bus or walk. I do not like cabs.

Nothing is inherently "wrong" with taxi's, they're just inefficient. Just like there isn't anything "wrong" with encyclopedias, but why would you waste time looking in an encyclopedia/dictionary when you can just do a google search? That time has value, and if you choose to waste time, you're choosing to throw away money.

That being said, taxis have an advantage of being available if people don't have a phone or it's uncharged. So there is a marginal, practical use for taxis, but by-and-large mobile ride sharing is more effective.

actually in plenty of countries you have taxi aggregator apps

Won't they just... continue to operate? Seems like that's how they tend to handle this sort of situation.

We'll see. They can try to get an appeal court order blocking the original one, or they can just continue to operate and pay the 10k/day fine, which is nothing for them. The problem is that if they do so then I am sure they'll not make their life easy...

Can confirm. I'm in Bangalore, and a few months ago the city banned Uber pool. The next day Uber sent out an email "all pool rides are now ₹49". They eventually got the order overturned in a couple of weeks (by suing the city I guess). But they never stopped operating.

Governments could always require ISPs in a country to blackhole DNS to Uber's API endpoints. Or blackhole traffic to their netblocks.

Uber is not above reproach.

I would say 3 million EUR monthly fee to operate in whole Italy is too low, they should step up their game and make the fine at least 20-50x higher to consider it fine and not fee

The fine is actually 10k a day, so 300k/month, not 3 million.

ah yeah, couldn't edit and didn't noticed it first time, so it's even smaller pocket money

What is Uber except for a kind of insane taxi hailing system?

Here today, gone tomorrow!

A taxi hailing system valued 70 billion.

Exactly, it's valued at 70 billion and it's a taxi hailing system.

myspace was also valued pretty high in past, so was Yahoo

i can live without Uber, there are tons of LEGAL alternatives respecting local laws, we don't really need this bully company

Uber has it's ups: it's easy to use, it's a great option for travel abroad, where getting a cab is more complicated.

It is, on the other hand, highly unprofessional. When you call a cab, you know you're gonna get a cab and probably get to your destination without much fuss. When you call an uber there's a pretty definite chance of the driver that accepts your fare just drives by you and pisses off. That's a problem, especially when you're in a hurry.

Legality and morality-wise, however it's a completely different bag: they not only skirt and exploit laws that are made for the passenger's safety, that actual taxi drivers can't just skimp on, thus having a highly immoral and gray-to-illegal advantage over them. They also dodge taxes, like there's no tomorrow and they refuse to comply with any sort of regulations or legal pressure to compete fairly - they just leave. Overall their presence is a net loss to a country.

I would take the more expensive, flawed, but reliable option to a cheaper, unreliable option that also causes damage via predatory behaviour, thank you.

not sure how is Uber easier than any other taxi app, they are all pretty generic/same. agreed with rest of the comment

Reply on news.ycombinator.com