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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.
"(taxi licenses in Italy are numbered, each can cost more than $ 100k to obtain)."
There's the problem. Piss off Italy...
It's called amortizing the cost of an investment. Before setting-out for a business venture, the potential business needs to evaluate costs and how those costs will be managed. If the license, once obtained, is the holder's for life, then spending $100,000 for the license could be lucrative if the financing can be found to afford it. I also expect that if Italian tax law is anything at all like American tax law, that the cost of the license and other business expenses could be written-off to at least an extent depending on how the financing is structured.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
each can cost more than $ 100k to obtain
Holy shit! No wonder the last time I was in Rome it was ~€80 taxi fare from the airport to my hotel.
Kicker: Got to the hotel and found out they had a free shuttle.
No, it means they start with $100k of debt.
or they are the employee of someone that paid for the licenses...
If there is an absolute limit to the number of licenses, I could see companies hoarding them forever...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
In most cities, taxi drivers usually end up taking home about $25k/year after paying all of their expenses.
In cities like NYC, cab drivers make a little more, but have a $800k medallion to finance. It is not unlike financing a home where you don't plan on paying it off before you move again. When a driver wants to get out of the business they have to sell the medallion to someone else and hope they've paid off enough on it to break even. The financing tends to be rather high interest, so drivers end up mainly only covering the month to month interest and rarely makes any significant progress on the principle.
Default means a driver loses his medallion and the lender gets to sell it, the driver may still be responsible for the interest owed on the medallion even after it is sold.
The Western European champion for having the largest part of GDP as undeclared "underground" economy.
Also the only first world nation with a brain drain, of more educated people leaving than arriving, mostly because of lack of opportunity in a corrupt and over regulated economy. In the ease of doing business rankings, Italy is below Mexico and Colombia, and only a few notches above Russia.
In Europe you can take public transport if you are not rich. In Europe a taxi is a luxery.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
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.
A judicial court in Italy has ordered the UberPop app to cease offering its services, as it constitutes "competition" again the taxi sector (taxi licenses in Italy are numbered, each can cost more than $ 100k to obtain)
FTFY. A government solution to a government created problem. Granting taxi companies an oligopoly (a monopoly for all intents and purposes), hurts consumers by limiting supply and artificially inflating prices. Get rid of the $100k numbered taxi licenses, and let the market set the price for getting rides. A glut of drivers would result in lower fares, which in turn would cause some drivers to drop out, allowing fares to rise to a reasonable level for both drivers & riders.
If there's concern for safe drivers, that can be handled with an additional test for drivers by their DMV. For instance, the State of Michigan allows drivers to take a chauffeur's test and get the license for an additional $35. This isn't a guarantee of safety, but neither is the $100k medallion system.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Good.
When a driver wants to get out of the business they have to sell the medallion to someone else and hope they've paid off enough on it to break even.
First, most cab drivers in NYC don't own a medallion. The cab company they're working for owns it and essentially rents it out to it's drivers. They also rent out the cab itself, but the cab is actually cheaper(rent wise) than the medallion. There's a limited number of 'owner-operator' medallions where one of the requirements is that the owner drive the cab for X hours/day on average, and they tend to be cheaper than the unrestricted ones.
Second, medallions, especially owner-operator ones, have generally appreciated in value sufficient that they're more often treated as part of the owner's retirement plan/investment than 'hope to break even'.
That's crashing right now, which kind of sucks for those that invested under the assumptions of the 'old system'.
I don't read AC A human right
It is not the role of government to protect investors from competition with new technology. The medallion price drop will benefit the vast majority of drivers who as you mention only rent them at rates which leave little profit for themselves.