UK High Court: Uber Is Lawful (bbc.com)

An anonymous reader writes: The UK's High Court has been hearing a case brought against ridesharing service Uber by Transport for London, the government body in charge of public transport in London. Their claim was that Uber drivers' smartphones should be considered meters because they use GPS and data from external servers to calculate the cost of a ride. Meters are banned in private hire vehicles (and TfL's claims were backed by associations for local taxi drivers and private hire cars). The High Court has found that Uber does not run afoul of that ban. Justice Ouseley said the technology was fundamentally different from standard taxi meters. Transport for London welcomed the decision, but transportation lobbyists are likely to continue challenging Uber in court whenever they can.

Comments

Better Headline

[Anonymous Coward]

A better headline would be:
There is a law involving cabs that Uber isn't breaking.

They did not declare Uber legal. They just declared that smartphones aren't taxi meters.

Re: Of course it's lawful!

[AK Marc]

If you take the self-named terms as reality, then the best country on the planet is North Korea. It's a Democratic People's Republic, says so right in the name.

The fascist dictatorship calling itself "socialist" wasn't.

Judgement said no such thing

[whoever57]

The judgement did not say that Uber is lawful.

It only said that Uber does not violate the law against minicabs using taxi meters to determine charges. There are other lawsuits pending.

Re:However

[squiggleslash]

I'm making a joke about patents. I'm not commenting on whether Uber's in the right or not.

Although...

Regulatory capture, for the most part, is a myth. I've seen very few cases of regulation where somehow the regulated benefit competitively. Friedman's poster child for "Regulatory capture" was the railroads, and he was writing this nonsense back in the 1950s, long after it became clear over-regulation (and government subsidized competition) was utterly destroying the railroad industry, so it's hard to take seriously as a complaint.

Taxis aren't regulated because of a conspiracy of taxi companies to prevent competition. They're regulated because virtually every city in the world that has them wants to make sure customers aren't abused, and taxi companies go along with it only because a common minimum standard of behavior means more trust from potential customers.

And yeah, this is the point where someone mentions medallions, and I shoot right back with pictures of New York City streets utterly crowded with taxis and point out that New York is regulating the market to prevent it from becoming an anti-social streets-clogging menace. Medallions, and equivalents, aren't really used in cities that don't have problems with too many vehicles on the roads.

Uber in London? No idea. They may even be in the right there, assuming their drivers are not stopping when hailed from the streets. Uber strikes me as fitting right in with the minicab model.