Colombia fines Uber more than $629k for obstructing regulatory visit
reuters.com
reuters.com
Yet, taxis in Colombia are incredibly dangerous. As a passenger you are exposed to express kidnappings, drivers that are aggressive, adultered fares systems and drive unsafely in cars that don't meet any security guidelines (a large number of passengers have died on rear-collisions given that the most common Bogota taxi has no rear-reinforcement). For decades the taxi mafia's have provided an unsafe & horrible service, when Uber & other platforms arrived, users flocked, yet by means of aggressive protests where they pretty much block the city, the taxi's have forced some parts of the government to try to curve Uber.
Uber however has fought to continue providing the service that the consumers demand, and has otherwise tried to complied with every law. This fine comes from the industry of commerce regulators, who have tried to convince the technology ministry to shut Uber down, with them refusing. I hope Uber continues to operate in Colombia and use their legal means to fight this regulators who are not operating from a consumer benefit standpoint, but rather a political fight to protect a mafia that needs to be dismantled.
On the other hand, the cars are falling to bits and the drivers are rather aggressive (although it seemed to me that drivers were careless in general).
This doesn't follow for me. Most Uber drivers drive their own cars, no? That means the cars are the same as are sold in the country, which given the regulated taxi companies are using supposedly less safe version of fleet vehicles sounds a lot to me like a country specific problem with lax regulations on fleet vehicle specifications.
Unless Uber is also making available U.S. market/road legal cars available to drivers in Colombia too.
I don't know squat about the regulatory framework in Colombia though. So I could be totally wrong based on the flawed assumption on how extensive this "taxi mafia's" regulatory capture purportedly is.
One correction though: Based on what I’ve read, express kidnappings might have happened more often in the past but hardly anymore today. It’s more likely to be robbed at gunpoint from guys on a motorbike, and they like to target taxis (although other cars as well).
It's anecdotal however, this doesn't correlate to my experience(s) there at all. I lived in Colombia from 2013-2015, and return various times per year. For what it's worth, I am not hispanic, and very much look like someone from the US
I've taken yellow taxis in Colombia (in all the major cities) more times than I can count(both by myself and with others) and have never once felt in any danger, nor been ripped off (which has happened to me in other countries I have visited)
Of course there are news reports about taxi rides gone wrong, but in my experience 99.9% of yellow taxi drivers in Colombia are honest people just trying to do their job.
More than happy to answer questions about living in Colombia if anyone's interested.
I have taken a lot of yellow taxis all across the country, but mostly in Bogotá, Medellin and Cali over the last couple of years (about 2-3 rides per week) and have yet to have a single bad experience. The handful of Uber rides I had in the time weren't better or worse, besides being in better cars.
It really ticked me off that Uber let me open the app and order a car, knowing full well I would be breaking the law, and gave me no warning or indication of the risk I would be taking whatsoever. As a young woman with only the most basic of Spanish skills traveling alone, breaking Colombian law isn’t a risk I would have been willing to take.
Unlike Colombia, it's not dangerous for passengers -- at least the law-breaking aspect isn't. What's dangerous is how everyone drives. Also, it's a gamble whether you'll get a normal, sane driver, or someone weird or downright crazy. But that's not limited to Uber, you can get crazy cabbies too.
I think the worst experience I had there -- before Uber, this was a taxi driver -- was a guy who: 1) was speeding so much, regardless of potholes, I thought my teeth would fall out; 2) stopped to take a piss in the middle of the ride, without pausing the meter; 3) ended up confessing he wasn't sure where my address was, so I asked him to let me off a few blocks from my place.
Is there a moral to this story? Not really, I just thought I would share something funny ;)
In the city I'm currently in, Taxi drivers and unions have used various means to create political pressure - from peaceful protests; to aggressive protests; to attacking Uber drivers; to attacking their offices (they also apply the same tactics between each other when a different taxi company wins an airport license, etc.
(Oh, the city is Ottawa, the capital of Canada).
Note as well, Uber was "illegal", in the sense that there's no framework or license under which it operates, pretty much everywhere it started, and in many popular places still is. It entrenches, and then fights to become legal. You probably used Uber "illegally" (as in, operating outside of framework of existing law and regulation framework) before, without being so explicitly told or aware.
(and while this is not a message likely to be received well, and I genuinely mean it with best of intents - if you are a person with limited local language skills or awareness traveling alone, and if you are not willing to take risks, this is a good lesson to do research before landing. Much of the world is NOT equally tourist friendly, and nowhere is Ignorance of Law a permissible defense :( )
Cartagena was the worst with Ubers. I hailed an Uber in a touristy area, and immediately my driver messaged me (in Spanish of course) to get in the front seat, and if anyone asked, he's my friend. Once the Uber arrived, a taxista saw me get in the Uber and started yelling "es un Uber!" and my driver looked over at me and yelled at me to hurry up, before speeding away.
Uber isn't the only black market ride-hailing app that's been competing at scale in Colombia either. There's also Didi Chuxing and some others. However, I don't understand how the legal department in a company like Uber permits such a brazen disregard of local laws. Yes, this is a case of regulatory capture and there is hardly any subtlety in the way the Transportation Minister has worked to maintain a monopoly on legal taxi services for Taxis Libres, but I don't understand how you just ignore the fact that your service in entire countries is illegal when you are a large multinational publicly traded company.
For example, most US firms abroad give their receptionists a button to press when a police raid is happening. Pressing the button triggers all computers to lock and credentials of all local employees to be disabled, and someone from the US is needed to unlock them. The whole thing is to prevent local police raids getting anything except whatever legal decides they can have.
> The fine from the Superintendency of Industry and Commerce says Uber urges employees not to give information to regulators and to block access to company computers.
Call me crazy, but I wonder if they were trying to get a list of drivers, for the purposes of pulling licenses.
Then box the Uber car and call the police.
They all hide under the cover of "disruption" when there were ways to do all this without breaking the law and flaunting regulators.
"In March 2017, Uber VP of Business, Emil Michael contacted Kalanick's ex-girlfriend in an attempt to silence her into hiding an HR complaint."
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travis_Kalanick#Criticism_of_K...
I really wish things defaulted to "legal if not specifically prohibited", not "illegal unless specifically allowed" like this implies. (probably just a case of overly broad taxi legislation, though)
Unless we lived in an omniscient surveillance state that automatically notified property owners, basic tort law really couldn't address this effectively because the benefits of dumping easily exceed the risk adjusted costs simply because the costs of detecting and suing for illegal dumping on a property owner by property owner basis are far too great.[1] Indeed, the more toxic the waste the more the situation favors dumpers.
[1] To be clear, that's not a comment on pricey lawyers and slow courts, but regards fundamental structural limitations to such a legal system.
But to be fair doing such a thing is invariably already illegal under basic rules of property and tort, it's just that the penalties aren't very much. Though even with steep statutory penalties and even criminal penalties it still happens--people still dump toxic waste into the deep woods everywhere. But I would presume that the steeper penalties are somewhat effective at the margins.
It would also be a nightmare to have to go through the court system for every infraction.
not necessarily. we have kneejerk reactions to statistically anomalous events all the time. Some things happen so infrequently that the regulation does far more harm than good. People have a desire to do something, anything, but never question if something should be done in the first place and establishing rational criteria to determine if they shouldn't act at all.
Uber isn't a registered company in Colombia, which means it's operating illegally.
What does seem clear to me though is that Colombia is being disproportionate and possibly somewhat arbitrary & capricious in their response. What sort of country tries to ban people for 25 years! This is the bad parenting brand of legislation ("oh, you ignored my exaggerated threat. Damn"). And I'm not saying this out of support for Uber (can't stand them, which is what makes these kinds of stand offs a good spectacle)
- Uber adds traffic to already choked up/bad infrastructure
- Uber does not pay their employees benefits etc. because of their "partnership" so this leads to poorer health outcomes which cost the state $ later on
- Uber "voluntarily" pays VAT etc. (only after taxis pushed for this) but almost certainly not commensurate with their income
so yes, the company is dumping their enormous externalities without much regard for the country at hand, and it's not useful to insert a tech-focused example into the situation.
Yeah, I look forward to new forms of pollution just being dumped everywhere, new weapons that are automatically allowed.
And more specifically, the three people who were fined directly; are they really going to get out their checkbooks (or would Uber just cover it)?
I've always wondered this; you hear about these multi-billion dollar fines Google/Facebook get from the EU, and obviously they want to continue doing legal business there, plus the EU is a great friend of the US, so they pay them. But with smaller countries that are, traditionally, not on a great political footing with the first world, what do businesses do? Especially in this case where they are operating illegally anyway? Pay up? Throw the letter in the trash and laugh over an $800 bottle of bourbon like a supervillain?
Those numbers are so specific that it seems like they're the actual fines. At that point why even omit the third one?
No this isn’t going to hurt Uber but it’s not like there’s a lot of rook to go higher.
As a one time fine it isn't much, but it isn't chump change either, and it will make the company increasingly unattractive to investors/contractors/employees.
This is where economies of scale can start to bite you in the arse. Yeah, the world is your oyster. But when you have the entire world treating you as a target, things can pile up real fast.