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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: 1) by khallow on Monday June 29 2015, @01:52PM
Because the drivers are vetted, their vehicles must carry CCTV, and must be up to reasonable safety standards for carrying passengers. If crime were a major problem the government could, for example, mandate not being able to lock the rear doors.
So how does that discourage vehicular cannibalism? Pray continue.
I guess you have not looked at the situation before regulation. It was pretty bad. Anyone could set up as a taxi, and there were a lot of accidents, a lot of crime, a lot of problems. The shear number of taxis created a race to the bottom, where costs like vehicle maintenance and limits like maximum 8 hours driving a day went out the window pretty quickly.
It's a different situation now. And frankly, maybe a little racing to the bottom needs to happen. After all, I imagine France has other people than taxi drivers. Maybe we should consider their needs too.