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'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.
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.
Before anyone starts with the whole "medallion" thing, that's not a thing in London. If you want to publicly tout for business (i.e a black caps), you have to do "the knowledge" which is a very extensive and tough test for knowing your way around without a stanav. And no: having a sat nav is not remotely equivalent to actually knowing your way around
To be a vehicle hired otherwise (phone, internet), anyone can set up with the appropriate insurance and a few other bits and bobs. It's not hard and uber is not in any way "sticking it to the man". But surprise, surpirse, the other cabbies get pissed off when, despite the rather liberal regulations which never blocked uber from existing in London, uber still likes it's old unfair competition things like flat-out doing illegal stuff and avoiding tax.
At this point, it's known that uber will do anything for a buck, illegal or otherwise. If you use uber especially somewhere like London, you're part of the problem.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
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.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.