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After Protest, France Cracks Down On Uber
An anonymous reader writes: Just a day after taxi drivers began a high-profile protest of Uber in France, the nation's interior minister has issued a ban on the car-sharing service UberPop. The minister stated that the service was illegal, and ordered police to begin seizing vehicles defying the order. French president Francois Hollande agrees that UberPOP "should be dismantled," but says the state isn't legally permitted to seize cars itself without court authorization. "UberPOP is a car-sharing service offered by Uber, which brings together customers and private drivers at prices lower than those charged by both traditional taxi firms and even other Uber services. UberPOP differs because it allows non-professional drivers to register their car and transport other passengers. It has been illegal in France since January, but the law has proved difficult to enforce and the service continues to operate, AFP news agency reports."
At the heart of the matter, it comes down to being fair. If you want to require people that drive customers commercially to go through additional training, insurance, licensing, inspections, etc. then you should require Uber drivers to do that as well. If you don't want to require that, then taxi drivers should not be required to do any licensing either. But you can't enforce licensing on taxis and ignore it with Uber drivers.
Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
When I was small, some private company wanted to start bus service in my city, but government struck down the proposal. The government buses serve non-profitable and profitable areas. They make profit in one area and subsidize another. Private player would only operate in profitable area causing either a loss or winding down operation in non-profitable area.
Case with Uber is similar. Registered taxi services have to carry passengers at pre-determined rate. Sometimes it is not profitable specially if a customer stays in area from which you don't easily get return passengers. This gets compensated when you customer and return as well. With Uber, they will charge more or less based on the analytics and eventually registered taxi drivers would lend up serving less profitable areas and more profitable routes will be undercut by Uber. If Uber is allowed, it should have the exact same requirements: Publish fare, must take customers at this rate irrespective of where you want to go and should take passengers strictly in the order in which requests are incoming. Otherwise, it is giving unfair advantage to Uber over taxi service.
They are a global taxi service with centralized command and control. A taxi service which does not want to be treated as a taxi service. The only difference is they use a smart phone app as a dispatcher.
They lie about what they are and elicit sympathy for the 'little guy' to rip off the little guy. I will use the independents instead, thank you.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
1. That is Europe, the home of angry mobs that get shit done, unlike the US where protestors wimper in the corner and accomplish essentially nothing (blame / support your political systems for reenforcing said outcomes)
2. They were protesting the lack of enforcing a law on the books, so its hard to complain about their reasoning.
If you want to complain about banning uber or supporting them, then for fuck sakes do it.
Bye!