Protests against Uber are heating up in Europe
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
> In several of the protests, drivers aren't specifically targeting Uber and other service providers, but what they say is outmoded regulation that makes it hard for them to compete. Part of Uber's challenge in Europe is the variety of regulations governing the continent, even among the 28-member European Union, each of which has different unions and different rules.
It's easy to dismiss off the protestors as old hat for not reacting gracefully to a changing market, but the issue at least in London seems to largely be with the fact that their existing businesses are subject to more costs and regulations than the kinds that Uber and other services are facing.
So let's spare a thought for the taxi drivers who've spent years building up their skills and knowledge of the local area, especially in places like London [1], and hope that they can be given the opportunity to compete with Uber. After all, if it weren't for the existing Taxi industry it's possible companies like Uber wouldn't even exist.
There should be space in the market for both the traditional offering and the fancy new one, and I hope that they can learn from each other and improve as a result of the competition, rather than die out.
EDIT: To be clear, I'm not saying Uber should be forced to play by the rules. I'm saying that it might be time for the rules to be re-assessed based on developments in the industry.
[1]: In London, our famous black cabs are driven only by cabbies who've spent months learning London like the back of their hands in order to give their customers the fastest (and most interesting, in many cases) journey possible. See The Knowledge: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicabs_of_the_United_Kingdom#...
This is the fundamental issue: Uber's business advantage is to evade regulations that apply to its competitors; its business strategy is to try to drive them out of the market before regulation catches up with them.
http://www.corriere.it/Primo_Piano/Cronache/2006/07_Luglio/2...
Short English version: economist and professor writes an editorial advocating liberalizing taxis, and some taxi drivers printed a flyer with his face, home address and phone number, inviting taxis to honk when they go by his house.
And don't forget that a lot of that regulation - in some places - may have been written by the industry in question in order to maintain the status quo:
The recent injunction against Uber in Berlin is ignored by Uber and the taxi company that fought for it in court stated that they won't pursue that since Uber threatend to countersue for damages, effectively threatening to use their funding as leverage over a company that owns three cars.
The case you're citing is also a bit problematic: Italy is a bit a problematic state when it comes to threatening and lack of help from courts. The same thing could happen to an economist and professor writing an editorial advocating against Uber - just not by taxi drivers, but by Uber drivers. I'd blame that on Italy, not on Taxis.
My point was that the analysis of Uber was a bit simplistic in that there are some positive aspects to wrecking what was once a cozy monopoly created by regulations that are not there for the customer, but for the entrenched industry. It's probably different in different places, which is why a more complex, case by case analysis is likely needed.
If they're not old hat, and so on, and their business pays more taxes, why not branch off into Uber clones? If Uber does it, they can too.
As a side note I also dont think there is anything stopping a London black cab driver from signing up for Uber.
Perhaps it would be nice to see Uber using hackney carriages, I dunno. At any rate, I agree that Uber should be a force for good here in improving the licensing regulations.
Personally I've always had good experiences with black cab drivers, and many times they've given me a discount. But I've also found the same thing with Uber drivers.
Uber just today announced black cabs as an option in London. I'm not really sure what I feel about this, there is very little differentiation between Hailo and Uber now.
Or do you actually mean the unlicensed ones of people going around saying "oi, need a cab?"
As noted by one journalist
"If black cab drivers are as good as they think they are, then they’ll beat the new competition on a level playing-field. If they’re not as popular, they’ll have to bring down their high prices. Either answer leaves the consumer better off."
Well then, that's a perfect example of a situation where Uber would be more appropriate. Black Cab drivers are meant for quick journeys through London. Why should they go well out of their way? It's their business.
(although, there's no need for people to scream and swear at you)
(You probably know all of the below being in the UK but I thought I'd flesh it out for those overseas.)
Black taxi and minicab operators have been in competition for decades, with regulation finally coming to minicabs about 10 years ago, and an uneasy but mostly quiet co-existence since then.
This co-existence has been underlined by the difference in how minicabs and taxis work. Taxis can be flagged down in the street, taxis can use taxi lanes, taxis can use official taxi ranks at airports and train stations. Minicabs, at least within the M25, are restricted in this regard. They have to be pre-ordered and within perhaps 5 miles of Charing Cross, it's probably a lot easier to flag down a taxi. Minicabs tend to focus on account work, pre-booked airport runs, courier stuff, and suburban journeys.
The problem Uber and things like it introduce is that the friction involved in getting a minicab is almost wiped out. You still have to pre-book, but they have cars milling around everywhere, all trackable, with no surly operators to call. You almost get the taxi ordering experience but with minicab-level drivers and prices. As far as I understand it, the contention of taxi drivers in cities like San Francisco is not so different to this.
So I contend the problem is that "minicab style" services are significantly increasing in quality through things like Uber and even the apps minicab companies are themselves producing (such as Addison Lee's) and therefore taxis are losing many natural advantages.
Having worked in the minicab industry many moons ago, my personal opinion is that this is no bad thing, since minicabs have had a deservedly notorious reputation in the past, and I don't think taxis will die out because there's always going to be a "flag down" market.
What perhaps would redress the balance would be applying the congestion charge to minicabs to help maintain central London as a predominantly taxi zone, and enforcing a toll for minicab airport pickups. It's all about taking baby steps to maintain the uneasy balance that has so far worked for decades. (Or, alternatively, open the whole thing up, shake off 150 years of regulations, and have everyone on a level playing field.. but that won't go down well.)
With a minicab driver simply following instructions from a satnav, you might as well just have a self-driving car, which is no bad thing.
With a black cab driver using their knowledge and experience and eschewing the instructions from a system which wasn't designed specifically for London, you may have a more reliably fast journey.
Plus, they could even give tourists some interesting facts about the places they're driving through!
The ones that do the full test don't like the guys that did the short test.
In the US, the regulations for cabs tend to do little but drive up medallion prices. Uber cars are a much-needed disruption in terms of availability and quality, but you still can't really say that the drivers know much of anything about the city. If we had the equivalent of a London cab here in SF, I'd always choose that over Uber, yet I think you can probably undercut the price of an official taxi in London simply by ignoring the rules. That seems wrong.
If unregulated competition kills a good taxi service, that seems like a drastically different outcome than what's happening here in the states.
It's not hard to be disruptive if you break the rules
Sometimes the rules themselves need to be disrupted.
Sometimes something that just works doesn't need to be disrupted.
Can it? How can us be certain that the smartphone is actually the one that was in the car when the rate was approved? How does "fixed rate advertised on the outside of the car" match up with ubers surge pricing? Why does a rule that the majority of the population evidently feels comfortable with need to be disrupted?
I don't think disruption is necessarily a good thing. It can be, but it also can bring a ton of negative results.
Those scenarios are much harder to pull off with a "bulky fixed function meter device" designed to be inspectable.
Can it? GPS isn't to be relied upon, and a bad actor can mess with it pretty easily.
Unlike NYC (for example), there isn't any kind of "medallion" system, government-regulated pricing, etc. And unlike London, there is no exam requiring drivers to have any particular knowledge. If anything the outcry from consumers is more often in the other direction, especially from tourists. Tourists who aren't aware that Sweden has completely deregulated taxi pricing are sometimes scammed into paying incredibly high fares, because there's nothing illegal about charging $500/km, as long as that's the stated price. (The fact that Sweden uses SEK instead of EUR helps this particular scam, since many tourists, especially those just arriving at airports, have no intuitive sense of what a SEK/km price means.)
The problem is, what do you do with thousands of people working today as cabbies? Or you don’t give a shit about a large % of the population not having an income (and thus not being a consumer).
What's even more important, the tech disruption is coming to the vast range of industries and many jobs will be obsolete much sooner than most expect.
If we don't find a scalable, sustainable, viral business model to disrupt capitalism and focus on positive externalities humanity may be heading for a disaster and this one won't be a surprise.
But driverless cars will be available for usage in 10 years from now IMHO. Then what everyone would ask is why pay a cab driver?
Uber is not the plucky little start-up going up against big, slow incumbent corporations, like many tech start-ups did in the past.
Uber is the heavily funded 800-pound gorilla going after the livelihoods of the little guy.
So yes, some taxi-markets could do with changes, but the heavy handed and callous approach of greed-driven "disruption" is totally out of place here. We're talking ordinary hard working cab drivers, not fat cats in the boardroom of MegaCorp.
If anybody wonders where the growing hate against the tech community comes from, they may want to start looking in the mirror.
There's a difference between arguing that innovative disruption may temporarily cause some pain and openly pissing on those who find themselves on the wrong side of that change. There is way too much of the latter going on here.
Uber has really taken off here in part because the taxi industry wasn't catering to this need. I do believe Uber is following the rules because they aren't a taxi service. They can't pick up people who flag them down off the street. They really are just a very sophisticated private car service and shouldn't fall under taxi regulation. Since the credit card details are held by Uber it also ensures the passengers behave themselves unlike in normal taxis where drunk or rowdy people vomit or make a mess in the car putting the driver off the road for the night making the entire taxi service somewhat inefficient.
Would you rather live in a world where the service, its quality, reliability, cost and professionalism is that of the current taxi services or the newcomers like Uber?
I have personally been ripped off, deceived about the route and pricing and forced to put up with rude drivers and operators so many times and in so many places that I cheer any competition, be it public transport or car sharing.
Uber's drivers are in a similar position.
So what do we have here? Another example of pitting poor against poor, for the interests of one group of rich against another, emerging, group of rich.
I almost admire the skillful orchestration at play here, although probably I shouldn't.
Not exactly poor but paid like many other jobs in London which probably don't come with tips. Trouble is that the internet has just about surplanted 'The knowledge' and made it available to all.
Here's from their FAQ
"No - there is no cost to sign up with Uber, only a small commission taken on each completed trip."
I couldn't find the commission rates though; is it publicly available?