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Court Orders UberPop Use To Be Banned In All of Italy
An anonymous reader writes: A judicial court in Italy has ordered the UberPop app to cease offering its services [original source, in Italian], as it constitutes "unfair competition" again the taxi sector (taxi licenses in Italy are numbered, each can cost more than $100k to obtain). This sentence should be valid at the national level and comes after an injunction from taxi drivers in Milan, where a Universal Exhibition is incidentally bringing in thousands visitors from all over the world on a daily basis. Sources mention a judicial request to "block" the app, though no one is sure how this sentence has to be enforced and what the fines would be in case of violations.
Hmm, let's do that...
So, we double the 13000-odd taxis to 27000-odd taxis.
And then we compare that to the 30% of New Yorkers who use private autos to commute to work. So, 30% of 17+ million is about 5 million privately owned cars on the road daily.
Now, it seems to me that 13K taxis is about 0.25% of the total autos on the roads, so when we double the number of taxis, we should have about 0.25% MORE vehicles on the road in NYC.
Somehow I don't see one extra car for every 400 currently on the road to be a meaningful issue....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
If you want to see how extreme unregulated taxi services can get, I suggest visiting Kampala or some other city in a sub-Saharan country sometime - 500 drivers all vying for the same fair, to the extent where fights actually break out and the passenger is physically pulled this way and that, 30 people jammed into an 8 person minibus. Yeah, some regulation is just common sense.
Just zoom in on New York using satellite view: there are a lot more taxis than your 1 in 400 calculation, I would estimate around 1 in 5 or more in Mahatten. So you calculcation is at least one order of magnitude wrong, possibly even two.
I don't know about this case, but on this side of the world, it wasn't that simple.
These Uber and Lyfts didn't go and bully themselves in the taxi industry. They originally operated differently: You never needed a medallion to run a car service. -You needed a medallion to pick up people hailing you in the street.-
That is very different. What these new startups did, was use technology to remove the need to hail a cab. I could always just go and call a non-taxi car service with a phone. No one needed a medallion to pick me up after i called them.
Since hailing a cab is now obsolete, medallions are obsolete.
If your engineer needed to pay 100k to do work that isn't pre-arranged.....blah, the analogy falls apart so hard I can't even fix it.