The voice of the street has been heard again and French taxi drivers have seen off, for now, the upstart rivals from UberPop. The law is currently against the news service but I argue in my latest column for The Connexion, an English-language monthly distributed throughout France, there will be more battles to come before the war is decided ...
At first glance, it was just another of France’s interminable battles between truculent workers and authority, the protestors unrestrained by normal standards of civilised behaviour.
Cars were set ablaze and their occupants assaulted as licensed taxi drivers vented their rage at rivals from UberPop, a contentious USA import.
So what set this bunch of violent demonstrators apart from ferry strikers blocking the Channel Tunnel, farmers resorting to arson or, it is tempting to add, rioters in the banlieues?
Easy. The conventional taxi drivers had the law on their side, not when causing mayhem or beating up Uber drivers but in opposing the upstart network of private drivers using their own cars to undercut regular services.
As far as authority is concerned, from city and regional administrators to the prime minister, Uber is illegal. This may change if the company succeeds in its appeal to the Conseil Constitutionnel, France’s highest constitutional authority, to overturn the limits on taxi operations set by last year’s “Thévenoud law”.
For now, there is no doubt which side officialdom takes: two Uber executives face prosecution for running an unlawful taxi service, cars have been impounded and Uber has been forced to suspend operations.
Had I been asked only a few weeks ago, I would have offered a blank look, half-expecting to hear UberPop was a soft drink. A trip to the UK enlightened me.
My elder daughter set me up with an account, with the promotional bonus of £10 against first use. I sat in a west London pub, gazing at my mobile phone and marvelling at the details of my pick-up, not just the swift estimated arrival time but the name and photo of the driver and a map tracing his approach.
Compare that with my experience earlier the same evening, waiting 45 minutes in a restaurant for a minicab ordered by staff, promised within minutes but delayed because the only available driver first needed to break his Ramadan fast.
With Uber, the advantages are significant. In London, it is much cheaper than minicabs and hugely cheaper than black cabs.
On limited acquaintance, it is more reliable than either and has built-in security. I remember female colleagues complaining that our employer, a UK national newspaper, kept costs down by using what they called “rapist cabs” to get them home after late shifts. No one was ever raped, but unaccompanied women felt uneasy, occasionally warding off unwanted attention. The way Uber journeys are logged makes drivers instantly indentifiable.
In my experience, taxis in France are horrendously expensive and often enough, in places like Paris, hard to find. One national taxi-drivers’ leader, Patrice Trapani, readily agrees a small minority give the trade a rotten name with surly behaviour, slovenly appearance or downright cheating.
Against that, I see why his members regard Uber as unfair competition, its operators spared the same regulations and pricing framework under which they work. Nor is this, strictly, the stuff of Robin des Bois; the first thing UberPop did during a Tube London strike was to hoist fares by 500 per cent.
But in whatever modified form it takes to acquire legality, it may be here to stay, even in France. Resistance smacks of sectional rather than national protectionism but will surely be defeated by public demand.
I well remember gasping in horror at the fare for a short journey from Nice railway station to the airport. The driver agreed it was steep but blamed the mairie. It was another Nice taxi driver I saw recently on French television news, denouncing Uber’s concurrence déloyale but also admitting he had used it on holiday.
* The Wikipedia entry for the Uber company includes some disturbing accounts of its practices: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uber_(company)
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