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After a period of consideration, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has decided that Uber is a transport service, just like any other taxi company. There is lot to say about Uber's use of untrained, non-professional drivers and other abusive practices.
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The European Court of Justice (ECJ) Declares Uber a Transport Service
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There will be big changes for you but you will be happy.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday December 20 2017, @07:52PM (9 children)
Milk deliver is still a thing in some places. Especially if you have a house full of kids.
But Taxi Companies have made themselves obsolete by refusing to adopt App based hailing.
Cities haven't helped by propping up old tech and old rules in the interest of taxing and licensing fees.
There is still a place for the taxi companies if they would just get on board with the technology.
There is probably still a case for a slight artificial scarcity in rides, so that people can make a living at it slightly better than a seasonal crop picker.
I'm waiting for the city that kicks taxi companies to the curb and gives Uber/Lyft a charter with mandated levels of availability, minimum wages, driver background checks, and vehicle inspection, but in most other aspects, just keeps hands off.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday December 20 2017, @08:04PM (7 children)
Sorry, sabotaging important parts of our economies so that a few people can make slightly more, is a terrible idea. The desperation of people willing to work for slightly better than a seasonal crop picker is not improved by destroying the jobs that they seek. And transportation is very important to our economies. We're making everything else in that city worse by making transportation more scarce.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday December 20 2017, @08:20PM (6 children)
Many cities are restricting cab numbers as an incentive to push people to public transport, have less cars adding traffic around hot spots all day long, and to avoid cabs literally fighting each other over the customers.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Wednesday December 20 2017, @08:28PM (4 children)
> Many cities are restricting cab numbers as an incentive to push people to public transport
Um, taxis _are_ public transport.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday December 20 2017, @08:39PM (3 children)
Nitpicking. Chosen to ignore "have less cars adding traffic", haven't you?
Let me put forward the "mass transit" substitute for "public transport", a substitute which encompasses "less traffic".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Thursday December 21 2017, @01:04AM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday December 21 2017, @01:29AM (1 child)
True.
Not very much of an advantage in Europe, believe me. You'd be hardly pressed to find "middle of nowhere" places there.
The metropolitan areas are packed with mass transit (and murder at rush hours), the "rural areas" are very much like the suburbs I'm seeing in Australian "greater city" areas (except for the mountains): average distance between two neighborhooding villages in the 10-15km range. With at least hourly buses or microbuses between them.
You simply don't go shopping using your car: take a stroll for your daily groceries (if you don't grab them on your way from office), 20 mins walk max, 2-5 kilos at max - why buy more if the shops are nearby and you buy everything you need fresh?
You need to be quite pressed to use a car to solve your problems, even more so that the population density favor good communication (internet) infrastructure.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 21 2017, @01:59AM
Most auto transportation in the US is not to and from middle of nowhere. Not every pair of places in Europe have mass transit routes running directly between arbitrary locations. The problem is that it's easy for a massive number of cars to overload a road. When that doesn't happen, cars work fine.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 21 2017, @08:38AM
Maybe in the US.
Over here in Denmark, taxis are for the rich, the rest of us get to buy our own cars (with 180% taxes). When Uber arrived, we finally had an alternative to drunk driving, but that didn't last long, everyone - taxi companies, politicians, etc - were fighting to have them prosecuted before the Christmas party season. I suspect drunk driving fines is an important source of income on top of the 180% taxes on cars.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday December 20 2017, @08:53PM
Agreed. I'll also add that cities need to do better in building and operating mass transit. More people should be in trains rather than cars, but that also requires the city to do a good job of planning, building, and operating the train systems, something most of them in this country seem to do poorly at. (By contrast, in Japan, they do a fantastic job of it. No one dies there because a train went 80mph around a turn with a 30mph speed limit.)