'Legacy' London Car Hire Companies Lawyer Up Against Uber

An anonymous reader writes with The Stack's report that: The London Private Hire Car Association (LPHCA) has engaged a major firm of lawyers to present its case against Uber in the UK capital, citing lack of continuous insurance checks, Uber's tax avoidance practices and even 'loitering' Uber drivers as reasons to impose regulations which would eliminate Uber's competitive advantage in London. A lot of Londoners like to have that competition around, though.

Comments

fair competition

[azalin]

While I do think taxi prices are too high, I still have a couple of problems with the uber approach. The main reason for the high prices are quite a lot of regulations imposed on classic taxi companies. Uber wants to take a piece of the cake without following the rules everyone else has to abide.

Re:fair competition

[EmperorOfCanada]

The cab companies/cabbies are mostly scared of one main thing. They invested a massive amount of money to by their exploitation licence. The main regulation that they are concerned with is this quota. The rest of the regulations are generally nonsense or exist to prevent gross fraud. If Uber is given the green light these exploitation licences become valueless. In some municipalities these licences have traditionally sold for the million dollar zone. There are even banks that specialized in loaning money for the this market. Thus the cabbies will be on the hook for a licence that is worthless while competing on price with an Uber driver who wasn't stupid enough to put that yoke around his neck. Then the pricing regulation was there to largely protect their ability to pay off that loan. Thus there are two groups here, one is those who have paid off the loan who love the huge amount of money that comes from exploiting Londoners with this monopoly, and the other group are those who must have that monopoly pricing in order to pay the loan. Then when the cabbie retires they could sell the licence for a fortune.

But I don't ever remember signing an agreement saying that cabbies could rape my wallet.

Their PR arguments also hold no water. Let's assume that all their arguments about safety, quality, crime, and so on are all true. Why should we not have the choice anyway to pick who drives us? I am happy driving a friend to a location, they are happy to drive me, people drive themselves, yet somehow cabbies have twisted this into licensed uber drivers as being the best way to get yourself killed. So the regulations that largely exist for all drivers such as not being drunk, having insurance, having a safe car, having a licence, all make sense for normal drivers; so why don't they make sense for Uber drivers. Does the uber app somehow make them worse drivers?

But again; even if uber is terrible and dangerous, why should we be treated like infants and not allowed to make up our own minds? Also continuing with the uber is a death trap; then other companies could come along in a free market and offer safer drives. People would probably choose them instead. Free market. Just like all the other vendors in London who don't have quotas. Restaurants, lawyers, dentists, clothing stores. All of those businesses would probably love a quota eliminating new competition. But it wouldn't serve the public at all.

If you want to see a wonderful example of something that is this taken to its extreme: try and get something notarized in Italy. Something like 1,000 Euros. I think a Notary in Canada or the US will run you around $50.

But if this monopoly had never been set up and competition had always been allowed we would not be having this discussion and Uber would be having trouble making any headway in London, it would simply be one more competitor in a competitive market.

Re:fair competition

[drolli]

The main problem which i have with uber (and why i dont use it - remark: i live in Germany) is that normally the licenses which you have to have to operate a taxi service work in two directions: you are allowed to do business in a give narea, but you also have to, even if certain times are not profitable for you.

And yes i appreciate that if i missed the last possible train connection at 1am in a town with 20000 people living there, still there usually will be a taxi at the station within 15 minutes, which takes me the last 20km for the same price.

In a world where we allow uber to cut away the ham (e.g. daytime trips to hotels/business) for taxi businesses, tey would clsoe down operation in such areas, and the price for this ride probably would rocket in the sky, and uber would say "oh we just enable communication between customer and provider", and the driver would say "oh, i am a business, and it did cost me 100 Euros to get here".

The point is simple: in areas whit a lower density of cars driving at night, the customer is at a systematic disadvantage (since he can not choose the provider, but the provider can easily choose the customer because 20km by car over an nearly empty road may be very fast).

So be careful what you wish for.

Against the law

[cerberusss]

Haven't we had this discussion multiple times before?

Yes, Uber gives you a lower price.
Yes, it creates competition.
Yes, they act against almost all local laws.

Re:Against the law

[Zocalo]

Unjust or not, the issue then becomes one of whether or not it acceptable to try and change a law by wilfully violating it - as Uber et al are doing in some of the locales they are operating in - with the implication of whether that slipperly slope is *really* one that you want to go down, and especially so when it's a corporation making that decision just because it's inconvenient to their business model/profit margin. In some cases, sure, mass civil disobedience is necessary to bring about change, in others a lone individual might do as a trigger (Rosa Parks, for instance), but generally those are for far more egregious or morally corrupt laws than the kind of bureaucratic red tape and entrenched industry regulation that Uber is opposing.

Yes, much of that legislation is unjust, anti-competetive and so on, just as Uber is claiming, and some of it is also there in order to at least try and establish a minimum standard of safety and service. The correct process for Uber and the like to take is to challenge the unjust, anti-competetive laws first, potentially citing public demand for their services, *then* start operations if (and only if) they can successfully establish a framework that enables them to operate legally and in compliance with the safety and service legislation. Starting operations regardless and dealing with the legal fallout might be acceptable to them, possibly even considered as an acceptable risk within their business model, but it also smacks of "we're above the law" arrogance, which will lose them some of the public support they might have had if they were purely fighting it through the courts and better discriminating between the two sets of rules. Factor in the stories of how Uber treats its drivers when things go wrong, drivers having their cars taken of the road, and even the issue of their status as contractor or employee, and it's easy to see how people who might otherwise be supportive of Uber are not.

Uber every day?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck Uber for its practice that makes this site Uber news distribution point.

Re:Government monopolies are not fair competition

[Anonymous Coward]

Fact is two people should be able to enter into their own contract

So buy up all the roads you're going to be using, and select anyone you want to drive you along them. Now everyone involved in the contract is in agreement, otherwise...

The rest of us should be able to do as we wish.

...wanting to "do as you wish" with other people's property makes you a thief and a leech.

The excuse for the taxi monopoly

There is no monopoly in London. There are regulations for black cab drivers (which you can hail in the street), and regulations for private car hire (where you call up / use an app / whatever).

So explain to me why a taxi license costs $1M?

This is about London, not the USA.

Terrible headline

[goombah99]

Legacy? come on. how about License regulated taxi drivers lawyer up against illegal gypsy cabs.

Re:Government monopolies are not fair competition

[mjwx]

Untill plane with 300 people crashes into ocean like Malasian one did, then everybody screams "regulation!"

This is pretty much how we ended up with taxi regulations.

With unregulated taxi services you quickly reach the problem of oversupply. There are only really two ways of dealing with oversupply, 1) regulation or; 2) violence. Having lived in both a well regulated developed, western city (in Australia) and a developing, unregulated city (in both Thailand and the Philippines) I can say that regulation with all its prices and pitfalls are better than armed taxi gangs enforcing their turf.

Western nations experienced the problems with taxi gangs many generations ago, this is why we have regulations and people who've never lived in place like Phuket have no idea how bad it gets. Thailand manages to do public transportation very well, from the highly organised system of Bangkok to the ad-hoc Baht buses prevalent in smaller cities and towns, however in Phuket there is practically no public transport because whenever the government attempts to set up any municipal buses. the taxi gangs (AKA tuk tuk mafia) stop them, pull them over and beats the shit out of the drivers (if they're lucky, it ends at a beating). This is the kind of system that exists without regulation.

Having experienced both, I'd definitely prefer an over-regulated system to a non-regulated system.

Uber however is a self correcting issue. In a place like Australia all we have to do is wait for them to have an accident. Regulations protect taxi companies from being bankrupted by insurance claims by limiting their liabilities, the government will extend no such courtesy to Uber as they have chosen to ignore regulations. So as soon as they have 1 serious accident in a place like Australia, England or Germany the insurance companies will tear Uber to shreds. Their war chest might be enough to survive one such encounter, but two will kill them.