Uber announces suspension of UberPOP in France
uk.reuters.com
uk.reuters.com
The latest outburst of violence saw taxi drivers blocking access to airports in Paris forcing passengers to walk the remainder of the way. Overturning and torching cars that looked like they might be Ubers. There was even a video of taxi drivers on a bridge on the "periphérique", the motorway that goes around Paris, dropping bricks on cars underneath.
The government instead of punishing them bowed down almost immediately ...
Part of the problem is that striking is sacrosanct in France. If you're striking you can get away with almost anything like kidnapping your employer and holding him hostage or blocking a major port for days on end (MyFerryLink strikes) ...
We fixed it by telling them if they want to provide personal transport services, they have to adhere to the laws about that – insurance, a special drivers license, etc.
While the violence in France is inexcusable, I can understand the frustration when you are competing with some company that has such deep pockets that are above the law. It's completely unfair competition (other taxi drivers need insurances, registration, etc), robbing existing taxi drivers of their livelihood.
(Yes, I am in favor of disruption in the taxi market, but with a level playing field, and guaranteed insurance for taxi customers.)
That’s one of the best ways to keep the market fair.
Anyone can provide a chauffeur for hire service, even without a taxi license – you just need a special insurance and a special drivers license that permits you to transport people.
Many competitors of uber did the same.
uber was the only one who tried to operate without insurance, without the drivers license for chauffeurs, taxi and bus drivers.
Uber management is more interested in their own safety than their drivers, regardless of what they say.
Governement reacted only after the demonstrations, proving the justice happens only if you take it in your own hands. This is really sad.
It's now up to all the actors to find a way to make this work.
Apparently this didn't work as well in France as it did in the US.
Anywhere in the world you take money you are now engaged in commerce. And you have to follow the rules on commerce. Even the kid that delivers your pizza has to have auto insurance that covers delivery.
France doesn't have as many start-up guys and girls as you probably think and besides that they probably do not feel that uberpop is entirely without blame in how this all played out.
And if they start rioting they end up in jail.
Without a real, profitable business model, you won’t even get a loan from a bank here, not to talk about other investors.
Compliance with all the requirements, however, removes the economic advantage.
UberPOP is LEGAL in France, nobody has shut down UberPOP.
HOWEVER :
- A driver who wants to drive for UberPOP can do that, BUT it has to follow the french laws which means: paying a specific amount of taxes on their revenue, getting a 250 hours training, paying for a specific insurance
Of course, driving legally for UberPOP in France IS NOT PROFITABLE at all.
Uber can't have it both ways. It cannot fix prices for rides and expect legal drivers to work and make a profit with these prices.
Other services such as private limousines can continue, they are legal, as long as drivers operate legally.
UberPOP business model cannot work in France. But they are free to provide and distribute their app. The app is legal.
But if you hire a chauffeur (with his car), he needs to have the proper insurance to cover him and its passenger. Uber drivers actually must and have subscribed to them.
The issue with Uberpop is that most of its drivers don't have subscribed to that special insurance, and as a results are pushing the cost to everyone else.
As a regular driver, I would be quite unhappy if there was like 50k+ plus Uberpop driving all day long full of passengers, and if they were paying the same amount of money than an occasional driver, while being much more likely to have costly crashes.
Hence the reason to require that UberPop drivers have a proper transportation insurance in the first place.
Aside of any fairness, or legacy medallion system consideration, it is just a bad idea economically to have everyone paying higher insurance costs so that UberPop can reap all the benefits...
More long term uber shares a lot of similarities to napster. The music industry was never able to unscramble the egg after napster and the taxi industry is in the same position. Of course if you are an investor in uber your investment probably has the same long term value as napster.
From [1]: "We have decided to suspend UberPOP starting tonight [...] first and foremost to protect our drivers ." - Thibaud Simphal, CEO Uber France
Translation: "this is supposed to be a developed country with the rule of law, but the police is not capable of doing its job (or willing), so we're giving up".
Another pearl: "Since the first of January, only 215 new VTC [licenses for private cars, the so called "legal" way of becoming an UberX] licenses were given out in the whole of France, even though during the same period, we had over 25,000 applicants at Uber to become a VTC driver."
That's a 0.86% success rate. I'm sure those 215 cars were the absolute limit the market (of ~60 million inhabitants, with 400,000 passengers already using UberPOP) could bear and that the decision is not at all politically motivated.
[1] http://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2015/07/03/uber-annon...
We should get rid of the old system, but we cannot simply tell the people who invested 100,000+ Euros into a license that it's just become worthless. Should those people just kill themselves?
Yea, like complaining about other country's problems is sacrosanct in the USA.
Taxi drivers in Europe have to pay exorbitant amounts of money and go thru a gauntlet to be able to make a living.
Uber, imho, steals that living away in a very real way...
I'm all for Uber, I used UberPOP a few times to come back home late (5am), but not late enough (so the public transportation was not yet available) and there were not enough regular taxis (or they were overpriced.)
So Uber fills a need. They'd need to work with the local government but I'm pretty sure we will be the last to allow them; France is way to conservative and protective of the local guild-like organizations (like taxi drivers.) In the meantime I'll keep seeing drunk/high people driving home.
First, in France, even if you're not a taxi, there's a special driving license for "transport de personnes" ("people transportation" ?) which is required if you want to use a vehicle with more than 9 (IIRC) passengers, eg. bus drivers. There's also the matter of insurance. I think we can agree that establishing clear responsibilities and ensuring everyone is properly covered by an insurance in case of an accident is a good thing.
Then there's the taxi license. In France (as in other countries) their number per city is limited. Therefore at the end of their career, taxi drivers sell them and recoup the cost of their acquisition. That's a sum of money they don't want to lose. Those license can get very expensive in major cities like Paris.
Finally there are also some kind of regulations about the car itself (like you have to have a standardized indicator on the roof of the car, a taximeter, etc.)
IMHO we need some reforms to make sure every Uber driver has at least the right insurance and perhaps has followed some kind of course to be able to transport people. As for the taxi licenses, it's kind of an artificially created scarcity. If removed, there are some costs (existing drivers will want to get a refund, then they may want to change occupation, etc.) Finally, as for the car requirements, Uber takes care of the indicator/taximeter. They also have some rules about the cars.
In conclusion, Uber is not trying to disrupt a market, they're going against an existing institution with clear rules and regulations in a lot of countries.
Becoming a taxi driver here in Edinburgh appears to cost £165 - which includes a test which appears to be pretty straightforward to pass.
Is that really an "exorbitant amounts of money"?
[NB I appreciate that Edinburgh may be the exception - but Europe is rather large and diverse so making such a generalisation about an entire continent seems rather unwise].
Which is legally what uber is.
Uber just didn’t want to pay insurance fees.
It appears that the licensing process is set to only accept a very small amount of the total applicants. That way politicians and taxi owners have something to point to about how it's a level playing field, and they leave things to a black box bureaucratic process to actually stifle competition.
Uber does not operate as taxi, but, as they can be not directly hailed from the street, they act as chauffeur for hire.
Both require an appropriate licence from the City Council, and the licence requires appropriate insurance. Charges for the licences do not appear to be huge [2], but there is a moratorium in operation on the granting of Hackney licences at present [3].
Many of the Private Hire cars have both the local operator and an Uber sticker on the car. As an older gent with a Blackberry, I shall continue to phone seven sevens when I need to book a taxi. Younger people with smart phones appear to be using the Uber app, but there are also apps for the various Private Hire operators and for the TOA. One wonders if there is an opportunity for a 'meta-app' that can price a journey using all three apps and then suggest the cheapest.
I am not aware of any UberPop style activity. I suspect that carrying passengers for money in the UK is quite regulated and that trying to get round that would lead to difficulties. Buses/trains/metro are OK for most of what I do except for returning from convivial social gatherings late at night where I will prefer to use a taxi.
[1] http://www.toataxis.co.uk/
[2] http://www.birmingham.gov.uk/cs/Satellite?c=Page&childpagena...
Central Taxis 0131 229 2468
Not the case in Ireland. Taxis were deregulated 10+ years ago.
Same thing used to happen in NYC - but with the onset of Uber, the value of licenses (which were steadily climbing) has flatlined or even dropped.
It's unfortunate for the last set of drivers with these licenses, but it's a horrible way to run a much-needed service.
Insurance, training - absolutely. But forcing investment in super expensive legacy licenses is very inefficient.
Edit: actually I meant this tweet from yesterday: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/616683543830339584 which had the other one embbeded
"Crime is so obviously a good thing that you can measure how corrupt cities are by how hard they try to suppress it."
This is a country that is doing everything it can to create laws which increase the cost of transportation and reduce the ability to get a ride. It's a law that makes things less safe (there aren't enough taxis to properly service late night bars so people are forced to drive drunk - people die because of the law to protect a monopoly). We can look at the law and the reason for the law and ask if the price for protecting a government granted monopoly is worth the price (lives and money from increased transportation costs) paid.
Jesus christ this is literally the stupidest thing I have heard all day, and I have been following what is going on reddit since early morning.
If anyone ever says they were "forced to drunk drive" by anything they deserve to be slapped and have their licence taken away, forever. If you go drinking, you don't bring your car with you!!!!!!
Which country? The country Blablacar came out of?
More like people die because they (or, quite possibly other people) choose to break the law against drunk driving?
The presence of the law should help deter them from making that choice. But that doesn't establish that laws should always be followed or shouldn't be changed - it just supports the case that that law should be followed and should not be changed, which no one was arguing against.
Other things also help decrease drunk driving. Healthy social norms can have a big impact. Convenient alternatives also has a big impact. What we're discussing here is a particular, especially convenient alternative.
It is wrong to excuse people who put others' lives at risk because doing otherwise is inconvenient. But it is incorrect not to expect that some people will do so, and account for that as a part of the impact of laws.
Using a mobile phone as an automated dispatcher for cabs is a fine idea, and improves the experience for the customer.
Breaking local laws relating to insurance, background checks, surge pricing, provisions for disabled passengers etc. is NOT fine.
Uber often seems to seek to bypass that regulation because, eh, disruption. I would expect any city to do something when faced with a private corporation attempting to flout their laws for profit. Doing so is in no way correlated with any measure of how corrupt that city is.
Taxi drivers in france is expensive and drivers are uneducated, rude, unpolite. Compare this to drivers in england and japan where they respect the customer and provide a good service and then you will understand why uber disrupting french taxis. because the regulation is only based about how much money you need to put to buy a license while the regulation should be about having a proper formation and learn about customer service.
It is same with amazon and librarians. Librarian assume they just have to sell books. Since amazon they have to provide a service , help the customer , advise him, instruct him, guide him. Those things amazon can't do and those things will save the librarians. it is the same for cab drivers.
Uber is a good for us customers. Obviously it won't be a good thing when they will be on a monopoly situation where they will increase prices after having destroyed concurrents but who cares?
We just returned from Paris, and I can tell you that people in Paris are not happy with cab drivers (overpriced, and often refuse riders based on too many people, too many bags, or too short of a trip).
This smells like a campaign of a greedy and corrupt union hiding behind a law to protect its poorly performing industry.
It's a single data point, but crimes committed by the drivers of unlicensed cabs in London are a big enough problem for there to be awareness campaigns like this one: <https://tfl.gov.uk/campaign/be-cabwise>. Example of the kind of criminal activity that regulation is trying to deter: <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-22998900>.
Most of them drive like complete idiots and break numerous rules even during a simple 10 minute ride.
So my question is what does taxi regulations do exactly? Because it seems like it's not working.
Taxi drivers and politicians in Brazil are fighting Uber because they are losing slices of a pie that is deeply corrupted. A single person (most of them are politicians or friends with city councilmen) hold hundreds of Taxi Plates and "rent" them to ordinary drivers that obviously can't have their own plates because they're not fairly distributed and even if they were, would be prohibitively expensive. So these ordinary drivers start their working days owing R$200 to the plate holders, resulting in a service that has the customer safety, comfort, etc as the last priority.
We do have laws and regulations but it'd be naive to think they benefit the passengers. One of them requires the cars to be inspected every six months, which would be a nice thing, except these inspections are only another way for the abovementioned politicians/government have more money to be diverted - some cars are ridiculously filthy and poor maintained.
When Uber arrived last year it was indeed a disruption: polite drivers, well maintained cars, fair service. The so called inspections happen in real time through in app reviews by the people who are supposed to be protected after all - the passengers.
As the only city councillor to vote in favor of Uber in Sao Paulo well said: "it was a massacre", corruption is so evidently high that not even a discussion took place about how the things Uber does right could be incorporated into the existing Taxi ecosystem. And pg's statement fits right in: politicians fought so ferociously to ban Uber (faster than many other agendas that are crucial to Brazil) that it becomes a picture of how corrupt they are.
To complete, I think that services that try to disrupt existing services are good to take us to the opposite side of a sine wave - they come to draw our attention of to things we were probably overlooking. Honest cities and politicians will take the opportunity to bring the good things into discussion, corrupt ones will ferociously try to suppress it.
Although a disproportional comparison, I remember when I visited one of the post offices in my city as a kindergarten student in the late 90s - the manager that was taking us through the guided visit was very anxious of how emails were driving the telegram usage down.
You can't just leave us hanging, what reason is it? Why does the taxi driver cartel deserve economic rents at the expense of everyone else?
* increased levels of insurance to cover passengers and their belongings
* rigid maintenance requirements on the vehicles that do get more wear & tear through commercial usage
* background checks on drivers, not as much as molester/criminal type that the press likes to sensationalize, but just driving record - obviously someone who keeps running red lights, gets speeding tickets, gets into road rage and runs over people should spend less time on the road, not more
* once you've figured those requirements out, a third party needs to enforce the rules and be able to shut off the offending drivers
Most likely candidate for a third party is a government agency. Most likely process for approving/forbidding someone from entering the field of commercial transportation is licensing.
If there are better ideas that would lead to increase in public safety and decrease in bad guys abusing the system just to turn a quick buck, those are certainly worth discussing.
Uber might offer a better service to people today, but what's the long term (and the really long term) price of allowing this monopolizing corporation into your city? Do you sell out? In portuguese we say "barato sai caro", meaning cheap/easy options may turn out expensive in the long run.
a) many ( not all ) of the regulations that make cabs scarce and expensive are unnecessary
b) it is not fair to people who paid for the licenses to allow a competitor to operate without licenses
c) Uber is good for consumers.
Somehow, a reasonable compromise must be found
Some corporations become too big to fail, like Google or Facebook--they keep buying off other companies and buying laws too. America is a lobby nation. How can you honesly expect anyone else to displace the trillion-dollar company that Uber will eventually become? Unless you actually mean companies will spring up, present a threat, then get acquihired by Uber^. Money talks!
^ If you expect an enterpreneur to face Uber head-on despite multi-billion dollar offers on the one side and immense legal hindrance on the other, you expect a hero. We should expect a democratic society, not american heroes.
Not all laws are in place to mess with Uber or suppress competition, some of them are actually to the benefit of the public. Requiring insurance or having the driver registered as self-employed doesn't seem unreasonable.
How could it possibly be reasonable to leave it up to the person using the app to decide whether the driver requires insurance or not, when an accident may easily lead to a third party having claims against the driver?
Similarly I would like people who accept my money for services to be well do the proper paper work for the tax authorities. If you're self-employed in any other business you need to register that, why should Uber drivers be excepted? I can accept Ubers argument that their drivers are "independent contractors", regardless of how stupid I believe it is, but then they should be registered as such.
I don't disagree that many of the rules around taxi services are obsolete or hinder competition, but I also don't condone Uber just breaking all rules using that argument. "Disruption" can't be an excuse to pick and choose which laws to follow. There's a pretty good business case to be made for breaking the speed limit as well (They could call it UberHyperDrive, for people in a rush), but you wouldn't accept that either.
True, this law is unnecessary, but it's not hard to see why taxi drivers who paid for their licenses fair and square are upset
At least in Chicago, Uber and cabs seem to coexist pretty well. The main difference is, cab drivers seem to have a bit more clue as to the layout of the city and more efficient at knowing directions etc