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'Legacy' London Car Hire Companies Lawyer Up Against Uber

Posted by timothy on from the protected-class dept.

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.

2 of 239 comments (clear)

  1. fair competition by azalin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:fair competition by drolli · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.