Taxi deregulation coming to Finland | Hacker News Reader

Taxi deregulation coming to Finland

metropolitan.fi

78 pointsvelmu71 comments

Taxi's don't scale in an urban environment. Their use is exactly for night or irregular use. Go to Mumbai, Jakarta, or any low income country and you'll find yourself stuck for hours in a cheap taxi. We need regulation because the market will not build railroads and metro's.

"A developed country is not where the poor drive a car, but where the rich take public transportation". Visit and compare Switzerland with Egypt/India/... and you'll see.

This argument seems like a non-sequitur. Helsinki already has a well-developed public transport system, particularly considering its size, and nobody's about to abandon it and switch to taxis, regulated or not. Jakarta and Mumbai have crappy public transport because of a toxic mix of poverty and incompetent governance, and in both taxis are a luxury for the richest of the rich.

I always figured the primary point of taxi regulation in Finland was to ensure that the service would be available even in remote areas that couldn't otherwise sustain it -- but Uber makes it far easier to service those as well.

The overall quality of the taxi service _will_ go down with the price cuts. There isn't any way around this.

It was obvious already when Uber was testing their service in Helsinki without adhering to any of the legal requirements.

But it's not just Uber - many other taxi companies operate in Finland already with comparable smartphone apps etc. And they also manage to do it without breaking the law ...

Monopolies are hardly a recipe for quality service.

The market would build railroads and metros given the chance.

The market did build those. Look up robber barons.

This was pre car, it's hard to find recent examples.

We did have robber barons build one here, look up the länsimetro.

Building a metro requires enormous investment, with a huge but very long-term payback. Most of that return is not direct in the form of ticket revenues, but externalised in the form of economic growth along the metro routes, as well as environmental and social benefits.

Even where you have private companies building and operating metros, it's usually with the direction and financial support (such as land grants and loan guarantees) from governments.

There is no need for the initiative to be for profit. People are perfectly capable of getting together and doing stuff - in much bigger scale than a metro.

Yes, and when they do, we sometimes call it "government".

Nope. No one is allowed to opt out and people are forced to pay even though they don't want to or straight up can't use it and/or don't agree with it.

No one is stopping you from renouncing your citizenship and leaving the country.

The problem with your argument is you seem to want all the benefits for yourself with zero drawbacks. Society doesn't work like this and successful societies will never work like this.

> No one is stopping you from renouncing your citizenship and leaving the country.

That's a page taken out of the fascist dictatorship's playbook. If your position was remotely defendable I'm sure that the best argument you could come up wouldn't be a variant of "if you don'agree with me then let me expell you from where you were born".

I don't want any of the "benefits" for the price they're forced to me. That's the whole point.

> Building a metro requires enormous investment, with a huge but very long-term payback

Actually that's far from the truth. Any form of railway transport, with some notable exceptions like some french TGV lines, are absurd money sinks. The value of railway services in particular but public transportation systems in genetal manifest themselves mainly as externalities.

Right. That's exactly what I wrote in my comment above.

You've stated that there is a payback. There isn't. It's a money sink, and the only way that such a project is justified is mainly by state funding (public service contracts, state-owned corporations, etc)

I disagree, from experience. I live in an urban environment in the UK with extensive public transport and haven't had a car for the last 5 years.

I have friends and family who live in the 'burbs. There are plenty of times I take a taxi over public transport, including:

    1. I'm in a rush
    2. I need to transport something not small
    3. I'm feeling lazy

Note, that all public transport suffers from some fundamental problems (at the moment[1]). I live in the south of the city. For anywhere I want to travel to in the north I have to walk 10 minutes to get to the bus stop. In certain hours buses get out of sync with their timetables, so you can add another 10/15 minutes of waiting.

Also a lot of public transport has moved to the "hub" model, where you have a central hub which connects different routes. While perhaps more efficient in some ways, it's incredibly inefficient for the traveller. It adds a minimum of 20 minutes to any journey where you have to go through a hub. My sister used to joke it takes an hour and 20 minutes to visit a friend living on a different tube line in London. My home town is either 3 lines switches away, adding an hour and a half of waiting to a journey, or I go through the London Hub, inexplicably having to pay a premium.

So while I like and appreciate our public transport, it can be a huge timesink and when you don't want to pay the "time tax" of public transport, taxis fill the role.

[1]I say at the moment as we can imagine a point in the future where you request public transport with your phone and it can on-the-fly accommodate you.

Taxis are only quick in the UK because everyone else is using public transport.

In any undeveloped capital you're forced to use a taxi (or unregulated alternative) to travel any significant distance. Getting anywhere can take hours (travelling at 5km/h is common), is dangerous and uncomfortable (AC is not even ubiquitous in 40c heat).

So while I like and appreciate our public transport, it can be a huge timesink and when you don't want to pay the "time tax" of public transport, taxis fill the role.

Last time I was in London for work I naively hopped in a Taxi at Paddington Station because I was late for a meeting and the tube would take 30 minutes. The taxi took 35 minutes and cost an order of magnitude more.

Well, yeah, it depends on the town and the time. Here in Notts the buses have lots of dedicated lanes, so in rush hour it can be better to take a bus than a taxi.

Taxis* can drive in bus lanes

*Not private hire vehicles, which are not legally considered taxis.

> The taxi took 35 minutes and cost an order of magnitude more.

It seems that the moral of that story is that people should avoid travelling by car in places where roadways are congestioned.

> Their use is exactly for night or irregular use

I have exactly the opposite experience. Although public transport here is pretty good (by US standards, anyway - especially the subway system), I usually take the taxi. After all the apps appeared and started to compete with one another, it became extremely cheap (usual ride is about $3, expensive one is $6-7), clean and convenient.

And on top of it, taxis can use public transport lanes - so the traffic isn't that much of an issue.

This taxi deregulation is just a part of wider transport deregulation in Finland. The aim is at Mobility-as-a-Service startups to provide novel apps that integrate taxis, public transport as well as new services like Uber Pool into a seamless and efficient transport network.

For example, all public transport in Finland will be required to provide a ticket sales API for these new apps. The app can sell you a trip from A to B and fulfill by ordering a taxi to the railway station plus a train ticket to your destination. Here's the press release for an open API from Helsinki Regional Transport Authority HSL: https://www.hsl.fi/en/news/2017/hsl-launch-worlds-first-publ...

> Taxi's don't scale in an urban environment.

You mean, cars don't scale in an urban environment.

The limits on the number of taxis is typically to force up the cost so the taxi drivers could make more, not to improve traffic.

Cars don't scale outside urban areas either: Widespread daily private car use is not environmentally sustainable even with EVs, which still have about 50% of the lifetime CO2 footprint of fossil cars.

Taxis have the advantage that you can use them very sporadically, so they're a good solution for a world with less cars.

Uber left Finland last summer due to the harassment from the government and police, but it still made huge difference to the Finnish taxi system.

Before the taxi rides were expensive, service was mediocre and there was no apps nor anything else. After Uber started mixing the market, many new companies have started operating in the field offering travel packages etc. and almost all taxis can now be ordered with an app and people can see their location in real time.

Only thing that hasn't changed is the pricing (taxis are extremely expensive in Finland) but thankfully that's about to change soon.

Uber seems really shady, but their impact competitionwise seems like a great development.

1. Uber sucks, everything is great as it is now. 2. Uber sucks, but the competition is great. 3. Uber is great

I'm at 2.

Taxis aren’t that expensive in Finland compared to other Nordic countries or countries with similar living costs as Finland.

Swedish taxis are unregulated and there fares have risen faster than in Finland.

And Uber as a ride hailing service was perfectly legal in Finland. The issue was they were hiring drivers that didn’t have taxi permits (and didn’t pay taxes).

C'mon. Getting a taxi permit in Finland requires taking a bunch of mandatory courses on highly Uber-relevant topics like "how to use your taxi meter" (185 EUR) and "local navigation without a GPS" (260 EUR), then passing an exam with questions like "from memory, name all roads between random location X and random location Y", meaning you're looking at a bare minimum of 700 EUR and several weeks of full-time study to get licensed: https://taksikoulu.net/kurssit/#hinnasto

And Uber was way (as in, 30-50%) cheaper than taxis while it operated in Helsinki.

Uber is cheaper because Uber's investors subsidize each ride. Don't let this fool you. Uber will get a lot more expensive when those investors want to see returns.

Uber's prices will remain competitive so long as there is healthy competition. If Uber is able to establish a quasi-monopoly in a particular market, then prices will rise.

You’re confusing taxi driver’s permit (which requires exams, not courses) with a taxi licence/permit. Uber drivers didn’t have either and the latter is where the law is very strict. Licenced taxis pay much higher insurance and the cars have to be inspected more often, meaning the costs of a legitimate taxi business are much higher than unlicensed Uber drivers.

> Licenced taxis pay much higher insurance and the cars have to be inspected more often

I have yet to visit a city where these inspections and insurance premiums seem a reasonable cost-benefit trade-off for the median rider. The long-term competition from ridesharing, and lack of prevalent organized rider (versus driver) opposition to it, corroborates that observation.

Such permitting is a crony capitalist scheme to protect the existing taxi drivers at the cost of those wishing to enter into or compete with the industry.

See also cosmetology licenses in many states in the US, which are just dumbest thing.

If the pricing of taxis is correlated with local purchasing power, taxis are almost (#2 or #3) most expensive in the world in Finland.

It doesn't matter if the prices increase or decrease. The price will get adjusted according to the market needs IF there are no other regulations or interferences. If the prices increase, it means that there are other regulations or restrictions in place which are not publicly known or people don't have a need for taxis in Sweden. The former assumption is probably correct one in this case.

Outside of North Europe in countries with similar living costs as Finland taxis are still much cheaper like Israel or Japan even though their taxi markets are also regulated.

Also in Finland car purchases for taxi drivers used to be subsidised with tax money resulting in most of the taxi cars being expensive luxury cars like Mercedes', Teslas etc. Nothing wrong with luxury cars, but most people just wanna get from A to B and not pay fortune for it.

There is no mystery why taxis are expensive in Sweden. Deregulation legalizes price gouging, meaning few people will ride independent taxis or look a new companies. That doesn't just limit competition, but also puts more taxis on the road in relation to riders. Meaning higher costs.

> more taxis on the road in relation to riders. Meaning higher costs.

I didn’t understand this bit

In a regulated market you just, in theory, take the closest taxi because you have no choice. But if there are five companies covering the same area, each company is going to have less coverage or need more cars. Each company is going to have to drive longer to pick up passengers. One company might have no cars available and passengers waiting, while another company has empty cars doing nothing. All in all there is less utilization of cars. I am not sure how big the effect would be though.

That is ridiculous. That's like saying that the food market is more expensive because you can have multiple vendors of food in one area, so it somehow promotes price gouging. I personally like having differentiated choices of food rather than going to the state sanctioned store close to your house because they all have the same things anyways.

> All in all there is less utilization of cars.

Sure. Because there is competition for supermarkets, more food gets wasted. You did not respond in defense of your other point that somehow this would magically raise prices because ???

The food market is more expensive if there are multiple vendors and the customer don't shop around.

The price gouging doesn't come from multiple companies, but from the free pricing. Some independent taxis in Sweden charge 10x as much as established companies. Therefor few people would hail a random cab in the street.

Less utilization means the drivers have to charge a higher price to cover their overhead.

> The food market is more expensive if there are multiple vendors and the customer don't shop around.

Wait, what? The customer is prevented from shopping around for rides? Before Uber, you couldn't call multiple driving services and get a ride. What is your point?

> Some independent taxis in Sweden charge 10x as much as established companies. Therefor few people would hail a random cab in the street.

This makes no sense on the face of it. You could just ask before you get in how much the fare is going to be.

> Less utilization means the drivers have to charge a higher price to cover their overhead.

No, that means they have to drive more and hope they get rides which increases supply and decreases cost. By your logic, the more empty apartments there are in a certain area, the higher the prices for apartments are going to be because of "less utilization" and "covering the overhead".

How do you justify any statement you just made?

What you say is completely bogus. Taxis are not expensive in Finland, they are less expensive than in most Western European countries.

Interesting, I live in Espoo, and usually, I'm hesitant in taking a taxi from Helsinki city center. 20 min ride (17km) costs me on average 45-50 euro. I don't think this is cheap.

It might not be cheap, but it isn't more expensive than in other comparable countries. I've lived in Brussels where it's cheaper to ride a short distance, but as the distance increases the fare is comparable or bigger because the fare/km is higher than in Finland where the pick up fee is higher.

(Finland: pick up 5,90€ + 1,6€/km/1-2 people vs. Brussels 2,40€ + 1,8€/km/1person or 2,70€/km/2 people).

I can't speak for Finland but to me Uber seems similar to Facebook in many ways (though it currently doesn't seem like Uber is as successful internationally):

Taxi apps started out in 2007/2008 according to Wikipedia, most apps I'm personally aware of (in Western Europe) seem to have popped up at some point in 2010, roughly the same time as Uber launched in the US. I remember using a taxi app in 2011 but the signup was too much of a hassle compared to just dialing the local taxi dispatch number for the city. Currently taxi.eu seems to be the most successful brand in Germany but it's still far from ubiquitous. Uber isn't available (except for UberX, which is using a third-party limousine service, and UberTaxi, which is using regular taxis) for obvious reasons.

Facebook expanded beyond English-speaking students in late 2006. Prior to its launch in Germany there were a number of competitors, most prominently StudiVZ (later MeinVZ) which started in late 2005 and targeted German-speaking students exclusively (StudiVZ was obviously drew inspiration from Facebook at several points but I recall similar networks popping up -- and dying -- even earlier than that). There were also more general social networks like Lokalisten (founded mid 2005) and Werkenntwen (launched in late 2006) that also had similar features to Facebook and attempted to build similar online communities.

Many of these sites were initially far more popular than Facebook. Because Facebook wasn't initially available in German, Facebook was simply not relevant at the time. It was just one network among many and it didn't have much appeal.

Over time more people joined Facebook for various reasons and eventually the alternatives faded into obscurity. Many of the networks that were widely known at the time don't even have a Wikipedia article and didn't get much news coverage at the time, so it's easy to forget they even existed. Instead Facebook is credited as having been revolutionary in ways that simply don't hold up to scrutiny.

It seems the perception of Uber is similar to that of Facebook, except the competitors are still around. I don't think Uber was a necessary nor sufficient factor in popularising taxi apps. I'm not familiar with the situation in Finland but considering what is happening elsewhere, I'm not convinced Uber caused taxi apps to become a thing, taxi apps were already becoming a thing alongside Uber and maybe you're just seeing a causation where there's only a correlation at best.

It doesn't help that StudiVZ is based off of Facebook, so it's not really revolutionary either.

I pointed that out (Facebook even took them to court later on). But I remember running into at least two German equivalents that couldn't be based more on Facebook than merely fitting the description of "MySpace but for coeds".

The point is that Facebook wasn't revolutionary. It just seems so in hindsight because of its success and how much it overshadows everything else.

Everything stands on the shoulders of giants. Sometimes some of the giants get squashed. Sometimes some fall off the other giants. But in the end it's just a massive pyramid of giants standing on each other's shoulders.

Facebook, MySpace, LiveJournal, GeoCities. There was plenty of cross-pollination and incremental changes. Revolutions? Not so much.

I lived 8 years in Finland.

Taxis were not expensive, they were also easily available and convenient, and an incredible lot of people used them. I mean, you could easily get taxis in the middle of the night in small towns (below 5000 inhabitants) or even more remote villages, and regular low to middle income people would use them with no second thought. Also drivers would not even complain if they called for a short distance trip.

It was a shock for me, coming from France, where nobody 'normal' would ever use a taxi in a 'normal' situation. And if you ever try, you generally do not try again: no availability, extremely expensive price, and generally, as a driver, a moron who complains about you or anything. So most French people only use a taxi every other year to get a ride to the airport, and that habit was so ingrained in me that I never got to initiate taxi rides in Finland because it does not fit in my mental model when I want to get somewhere. But Finns had no such problem :-)

I thought Finland was one of the few places where taxi prices were high enough that taxi drivers could make a fair living off it. Those days are probably gone.. I don't see the great innovations that ride hailing services bring to the table at this point.

Having another person drive you around should expensive in my opinion.

You have to keep in mind that prices are, generally, not magical. The price is a balance between what people are willing to sell something for and what people are willing to buy it for. Of course that's elementary, but thinking about this will explain why drivers, in general, will not be well paid.

Driving is a low value skill that the vast majority of people have, and if they don't have - they can learn it rapidly. Let's imagine now being a driver was lucrative. Well you'd have a ton of people racing to become drivers, no pun intended. But with so many people willing to drive people around, it'd mean a shortage of work for all the drivers. And so somebody would offer to drive people for a little bit less. And that'd repeat on downward until we reached the equilibrium point at which not enough drivers were willing to go below.

There are some exceptions like truck driving where people spend hours and hours on the road driving vehicles that do require some degree of skill to manage. And so the wages there are still pretty decent. It's not just driving per se, but unpleasant work that requires some degree of skill.

Ride sharing apps bring market efficiency. If you're willing to drive for $x and people are willing to pay $x, well - why shouldn't you be able to? They're still centralized of course, but I think it takes us one step closer to decentralizing the entire industry which would be amazing, as it entirely removes the middle man and let's people simply directly offer and purchase each others' labor. Of course this ideal is pointless in this particular case as automation is imminent and will super-centralize the industry. Although there prices will likely be lower than even a decentralized market could offer.

> I thought Finland was one of the few places where taxi prices were high enough that taxi drivers could make a fair living off it.

Please explain why taxi drivers, or any occupation should be able to make a "fair living" (ill defined term) off of it.

In the majority of cases, the only thing regulation of an industry does is raise artificial walls and lower overall use of the good/service. Or maybe you think the DPRK, Venezuela, and Cuba are good examples.

Taxi service has been great in finland. Competent drivers (they know their way around the city) and clean cars. Pretty good availability, except for the one hour when the bars close when you have to fight for your life at the taxi stop :)

And you could actually make a decent living driving cabs.

This will probably change and the foreigners who now deliver our food (Foodora et.al.) will start driving taxis.

So drivers getting lost and crashing in the winter months because of lacking skills in snow driving. And of course not speaking finnish so handling the eldery and school transports which are a big service taxis provide here might get more difficult. We'll see... But in my opinnion it is not possible to operate taxis much more cheaply (and with the same quality) as we have now.

I wonder where Finland draws the line between "taxi" and "ride sharing" (stuff like the Waze commute thing).

If they deregulate it’s not unthinkable that they are looking across the water to Sweden. In Sweden there is no difference between different operators, Uber is a Taxi company. You can’t drive anyone for money without being a taxi company.

Actual ride sharing where no one makes money is obviously not taxi. What Waze commute will count as I suspect is still up in the air so long as neither of the people in the car makes any money.

Finland doesn't exists.

Exist

This reads more like a promotional piece for Whim - rather than a neutral article - as well as no reference for the regulation change (although it is happening).

They mention Whim twice + a pic of the app. I don't really see how that's too promotional. Even Fixutaxi is mentioned more.

Finland is just killing it lately, I wish Sweden could be more like Finland.

In what sense? Sweden has had a deregulated taxi market for ages

Could you be more specific? Sure Finland has a lot of great things, despite its small size, but it seems odd that you'd say "lately".

It’s funny the outsiders perspective of Finland. I can assure you there are plenty of problems here. The government being broke for one and making obscene cuts across the board.

i.e. The government is reducing taxes and reducing services.
That's precisely WHY some people like Finland. The government is stepping out of the way (as we can see in this article)

That actually sounds perfect in my book, where they are supposed to be as broke as possible and do as little as possible or nothing. :-)
(Yes yes, I'm well aware that most other HNers are of another opinion than I am.)

By the numbers Finland looks like one of the not-so-broke governments in EU: https://www.statista.com/statistics/269684/national-debt-in-...
A common neoliberal political strategy is to kick up drama about state finances to justify tax cuts and reductions in public services in spite of popular support for welfare, maybe the same here?

With the healthcare system being privatized, higher education receiving massive cutbacks, falling PISA scores, social welfare being slashed and shoehorned into a new model conditional on employment status, mass surveillance bills being pushed through parliament, a rising far right etc. etc... I agree that it would be wonderful if any country could be more like Finland now, but I doubt you'd want to head the way the country is currently going.

Swedish taxis have been deregulated for ages. It means you have to be careful at the airport, because the taxis waiting can charge you absolutely what they want to take you into the city.

I realize you're not saying that as a putdown, but please don't post unsubstantive comments about nationalities to HN—it provokes off-topic, often flamewarrish subthreads.

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