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French taxi drivers are the latest to protest the entry of Uber into their protected market. Their protests feature vandalism and blocking roads. From the AP story:
French taxi drivers pulled out the throttle in an all-out confrontation with the ultra-cheap Uber car service Thursday, smashing livery cars, setting tires ablaze and blocking traffic during a nationwide strike that caught tourists and celebrities alike in the mayhem.
[...] Taxi drivers justified their rage, saying Uber's lowest-cost service UberPop was ruining their livihoods.[sic]
[...] Anger seethed across France, with riot police chasing strikers from Paris' ring road, where protesters torched tires and swarmed onto exit ramps during rush hour on the busy artery that leads to Charles de Gaulle airport. In Toulouse in the southwest, angry taxi drivers dumped flour onto UberPop cars, tires were burned in Nantes in the west, and in Lyon, in the southeast, roads were blocked.
Compare this to Uber protests in London.
Vive le monopole!
Original Submission
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Sunday June 28 2015, @11:39PM
They should, but this is France.
And you can see their point (even though you don't agree with it), taxi drives in france have to pay €200,000 for a license to operate. That's a lot of cash that Uber don't pay. With 50,000 taxis in france, that's €10 billion the government has taken.
(Score: 5, Informative) by dusty monkey on Monday June 29 2015, @12:54AM
taxi drives in france have to pay €200,000 for a license to operate. That's a lot of cash that Uber don't pay. With 50,000 taxis in france, that's €10 billion the government has taken.
I see the reason that your opinion on this matter is so bizarre and irrational. You think that the government collected the €200,000 per license.
No, it didn't. The €200,000 was transfered from the new license holder to the previous license holder. When the State issues a new license, its essentially for free.
You dont realize that you are arguing for the State fixing buyers remorse, but thats in fact what you are doing. The taxi operators that paid €200,000 for their medallion could have waited for a free one. They didn't want to wait for the State to issue new medallions (possibly because its unlikely to happen any time soon), so they went to the private market and purchased an existing one that at one point in time was issued for free by the State.
The State created the medallion scarcity, but it did not collect anyones €200,000. Those that own medallions want them to continue to be scarce for sure, but that is not the responsibility of the State. This is why the big taxi services lobby the State to prevent new medallions from being issued. They dont want the medallions they own to depreciate in value and they dont want competition depreciating their value further. They want the opposite of that. They want their medallions to appreciate in value and they want less competition appreciating the value further.
It is not the States job to protect your business model, but with enough money you can lobby the State to do it anyways. That is what is happening here.
- when you vote for the lesser of two evils, you are still voting for evil - stop supporting evil -