6 ms·

Protests against Uber are heating up in Europe

24 points by phibs 12y ago

mantrax5 12y ago
Taxi drivers in Europe are paid a fraction of the profits they get from clients, most of it goes to taxes and the operators running the cab networks. Uber's drivers are in a similar position. So what do we have here? Another example of pitting poor against poor, for the interests of one group of rich against another, emerging, group of rich. I almost admire the skillful orchestration at play here, although probably I shouldn't.
- vixin 12y ago
  http://www1.salary.com/CT/New-London/Taxi-Driver-salary.html http://www1.salary.com/CT/New-London/Taxi-Driver-salary.html Not exactly poor but paid like many other jobs in London which probably don't come with tips. Trouble is that the internet has just about surplanted 'The knowledge' and made it available to all.
  - chc 12y ago
    That appears to be a place in Connecticut, not the London under discussion here.
- vishnugupta 12y ago
  > Uber's drivers are in a similar position. Except that now they have to pay Uber as well. Here's from their FAQ "No - there is no cost to sign up with Uber, only a small commission taken on each completed trip." I couldn't find the commission rates though; is it publicly available?
paulrov 12y ago
Way to win me over to your side guys by inconveniencing your customer.
basicallydan 12y ago
I'd like to highlight this part of the article: > In several of the protests, drivers aren't specifically targeting Uber and other service providers, but what they say is outmoded regulation that makes it hard for them to compete. Part of Uber's challenge in Europe is the variety of regulations governing the continent, even among the 28-member European Union, each of which has different unions and different rules. It's easy to dismiss off the protestors as old hat for not reacting gracefully to a changing market, but the issue at least in London seems to largely be with the fact that their existing businesses are subject to more costs and regulations than the kinds that Uber and other services are facing. So let's spare a thought for the taxi drivers who've spent years building up their skills and knowledge of the local area, especially in places like London [1], and hope that they can be given the opportunity to compete with Uber. After all, if it weren't for the existing Taxi industry it's possible companies like Uber wouldn't even exist. There should be space in the market for both the traditional offering and the fancy new one, and I hope that they can learn from each other and improve as a result of the competition, rather than die out. EDIT: To be clear, I'm not saying Uber should be forced to play by the rules. I'm saying that it might be time for the rules to be re-assessed based on developments in the industry. [1]: In London, our famous black cabs are driven only by cabbies who've spent months learning London like the back of their hands in order to give their customers the fastest (and most interesting, in many cases) journey possible. See The Knowledge: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicabs_of_the_United_Kingdom#The_Knowledge http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicabs_of_the_United_Kingdom#...
- davidgerard 12y ago
  >It's easy to dismiss off the protestors as old hat for not reacting gracefully to a changing market, but the issue at least in London seems to largely be with the fact that their existing businesses are subject to more costs and regulations than the kinds that Uber and other services are facing. This is the fundamental issue: Uber's business advantage is to evade regulations that apply to its competitors; its business strategy is to try to drive them out of the market before regulation catches up with them.
  - davidw 12y ago
ddebernardy 12y ago
Is this the first EU-wide strike, or has there been any such things in the past?
- phibs 12y ago
  EU-wide it is indeed the first one, but as far as I know there have already been quite a lot regional ones.
jontro 12y ago
I just do not see why uber can be disruptive AND follow the rules. Here in Sweden they are lobbying to get exception from the rules, i.e. not having a meter and not having price comparisons on the cars. It's not hard to be disruptive if you break the rules
- cromwellian 12y ago
  But why require every car to have this bulky fixed function meter device when a smartphone app can do the job just as well? Sometimes the rules themselves need to be disrupted.
  - bowlofpetunias 12y ago
    Why replace something that works and can be systematically verified for something that will lead to all kinds of complications and may be outdated in 5 years? Sometimes something that just works doesn't need to be disrupted.
  - Xylakant 12y ago
    > But why require every car to have this bulky fixed function meter device when a smartphone app can do the job just as well? Can it? How can us be certain that the smartphone is actually the one that was in the car when the rate was approved? How does "fixed rate advertised on the outside of the car" match up with ubers surge pricing? Why does a rule that the majority of the population evidently feels comfortable with need to be disrupted? I don't think disruption is necessarily a good thing. It can be, but it also can bring a ton of negative results.
  - dalke 12y ago
    "Just as well" in all factors? What's the audit trail for smartphone app? Can modifications to the app be detected, or the app replaced with a real-looking fake app which favors the driver? Might the driver have two smart phones, one with real app and another with a fake app, and choose one based on the likelihood of not being caught? Those scenarios are much harder to pull off with a "bulky fixed function meter device" designed to be inspectable.
  - 12y ago
hellbreakslose 12y ago
Taxi drivers should consider reducing their prices if they want their business to go up. Sorry but I don't think am the only one that thinks taxi drivers average salary is way higher than any software developers... Think their salary is un-taxed... most of it.
timr 12y ago
I'm not sure I believe as strongly in the idea in places like London, where the official cab service is both highly regulated, and quite good. In the US, the regulations for cabs tend to do little but drive up medallion prices. Uber cars are a much-needed disruption in terms of availability and quality, but you still can't really say that the drivers know much of anything about the city. If we had the equivalent of a London cab here in SF, I'd always choose that over Uber, yet I think you can probably undercut the price of an official taxi in London simply by ignoring the rules. That seems wrong. If unregulated competition kills a good taxi service, that seems like a drastically different outcome than what's happening here in the states.
atmosx 12y ago
Sad to see the taxi drivers. What they don’t understand is that soon they will be obsolete. As many other groups. IT startups are extremely disruptive and changes like these are hard to stop. With Google driverless cars around, it’s safe to say that in 30 years no one will need a driver. Uber and competitors could just buy driverless, extra-comfortable cars and get over with. The problem is, what do you do with thousands of people working today as cabbies? Or you don’t give a shit about a large % of the population not having an income (and thus not being a consumer).
- vdaniuk 12y ago
  Who is that "you" that is supposedly don't give a shit? What's even more important, the tech disruption is coming to the vast range of industries and many jobs will be obsolete much sooner than most expect.
  - atmosx 12y ago
    Sorry, might have made it clear. By 'you' I was referring to governments. What do you do as a government.
    - vdaniuk 12y ago
      Cab drivers is just one small segment. That is a very good point to consider and even we, as a collective hivemind, on the HN don't pay enough attention to the problem of extreme rate at which jobs will diminish in the future. Start-ups won't solve that. If we don't find a scalable, sustainable, viral business model to disrupt capitalism and focus on positive externalities humanity may be heading for a disaster and this one won't be a surprise.
- archagon 12y ago
  30 years?! Good luck with that. Manual cars will be around for a long, long time.
  - atmosx 12y ago
s_dev 12y ago
Taxi's in Dublin have been a problem for a long time especially for people with up the socioeconomic ladder. The quality of the vehicles can vary as well as the manner of the driver. Regulation states the vehicles have to be clean but the driver is welcome to wear whatever they like and they often wear tracksuits and often espouse racist views (especially against Nigerian taxi drivers) which undermines the perceived professionalism of the industry here. Uber has really taken off here in part because the taxi industry wasn't catering to this need. I do believe Uber is following the rules because they aren't a taxi service. They can't pick up people who flag them down off the street. They really are just a very sophisticated private car service and shouldn't fall under taxi regulation. Since the credit card details are held by Uber it also ensures the passengers behave themselves unlike in normal taxis where drunk or rowdy people vomit or make a mess in the car putting the driver off the road for the night making the entire taxi service somewhat inefficient.
jsudhams 12y ago
Not sure about the UK cabs way of work. But what stops them being a UBER cab driver as well? Isn't it a additional channel? Like in radio taxi can't they simple make themselves busy when they get UBER call so that the cab company does not assign them any additional pickup/drop?
- dagw 12y ago
  At least in Sweden, to be a cab you have to clearly mark your car as a taxi, clearly post your rates in the window and have a verified taxi meter in your car to make sure you actually charge the posted rates, and Uber doesn't want to do any of those things.
arb99 12y ago
More people have heard about Uber thanks to these strikes than they ever would have (for the time being anyway...)
bowlofpetunias 12y ago
It's interesting how the tech start-up community suffers from the same inability to shift perspective that Microsoft had when it became a powerful megacorp but still saw itself as the underdog. Uber is not the plucky little start-up going up against big, slow incumbent corporations, like many tech start-ups did in the past. Uber is the heavily funded 800-pound gorilla going after the livelihoods of the little guy. So yes, some taxi-markets could do with changes, but the heavy handed and callous approach of greed-driven "disruption" is totally out of place here. We're talking ordinary hard working cab drivers, not fat cats in the boardroom of MegaCorp. If anybody wonders where the growing hate against the tech community comes from, they may want to start looking in the mirror. There's a difference between arguing that innovative disruption may temporarily cause some pain and openly pissing on those who find themselves on the wrong side of that change. There is way too much of the latter going on here.
- collyw 12y ago
  I guess you haven't had the misfortune of being ripped of by London taxi drivers.
_pmf_ 12y ago
Why should we be excited for some US company siphoning off money from people who are already at the lower end of the wage scale?
avz 12y ago
It boils down to the simple question: Would you rather live in a world where the service, its quality, reliability, cost and professionalism is that of the current taxi services or the newcomers like Uber? I have personally been ripped off, deceived about the route and pricing and forced to put up with rude drivers and operators so many times and in so many places that I cheer any competition, be it public transport or car sharing.

24 points by phibs 12y ago

Taxi drivers in Europe are paid a fraction of the profits they get from clients, most of it goes to taxes and the operators running the cab networks. Uber's drivers are in a similar position. So what do we have here? Another example of pitting poor against poor, for the interests of one group of rich against another, emerging, group of rich. I almost admire the skillful orchestration at play here, although probably I shouldn't.

vixin 12y ago
http://www1.salary.com/CT/New-London/Taxi-Driver-salary.html http://www1.salary.com/CT/New-London/Taxi-Driver-salary.html Not exactly poor but paid like many other jobs in London which probably don't come with tips. Trouble is that the internet has just about surplanted 'The knowledge' and made it available to all.
- chc 12y ago
  That appears to be a place in Connecticut, not the London under discussion here.
vishnugupta 12y ago
> Uber's drivers are in a similar position. Except that now they have to pay Uber as well. Here's from their FAQ "No - there is no cost to sign up with Uber, only a small commission taken on each completed trip." I couldn't find the commission rates though; is it publicly available?

paulrov 12y ago

Way to win me over to your side guys by inconveniencing your customer.

basicallydan 12y ago

I'd like to highlight this part of the article: > In several of the protests, drivers aren't specifically targeting Uber and other service providers, but what they say is outmoded regulation that makes it hard for them to compete. Part of Uber's challenge in Europe is the variety of regulations governing the continent, even among the 28-member European Union, each of which has different unions and different rules. It's easy to dismiss off the protestors as old hat for not reacting gracefully to a changing market, but the issue at least in London seems to largely be with the fact that their existing businesses are subject to more costs and regulations than the kinds that Uber and other services are facing. So let's spare a thought for the taxi drivers who've spent years building up their skills and knowledge of the local area, especially in places like London [1], and hope that they can be given the opportunity to compete with Uber. After all, if it weren't for the existing Taxi industry it's possible companies like Uber wouldn't even exist. There should be space in the market for both the traditional offering and the fancy new one, and I hope that they can learn from each other and improve as a result of the competition, rather than die out. EDIT: To be clear, I'm not saying Uber should be forced to play by the rules. I'm saying that it might be time for the rules to be re-assessed based on developments in the industry. [1]: In London, our famous black cabs are driven only by cabbies who've spent months learning London like the back of their hands in order to give their customers the fastest (and most interesting, in many cases) journey possible. See The Knowledge: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicabs_of_the_United_Kingdom#The_Knowledge http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicabs_of_the_United_Kingdom#...

davidgerard 12y ago
>It's easy to dismiss off the protestors as old hat for not reacting gracefully to a changing market, but the issue at least in London seems to largely be with the fact that their existing businesses are subject to more costs and regulations than the kinds that Uber and other services are facing. This is the fundamental issue: Uber's business advantage is to evade regulations that apply to its competitors; its business strategy is to try to drive them out of the market before regulation catches up with them.
- davidw 12y ago

ddebernardy 12y ago

Is this the first EU-wide strike, or has there been any such things in the past?

phibs 12y ago
EU-wide it is indeed the first one, but as far as I know there have already been quite a lot regional ones.

jontro 12y ago

I just do not see why uber can be disruptive AND follow the rules. Here in Sweden they are lobbying to get exception from the rules, i.e. not having a meter and not having price comparisons on the cars. It's not hard to be disruptive if you break the rules

cromwellian 12y ago
But why require every car to have this bulky fixed function meter device when a smartphone app can do the job just as well? Sometimes the rules themselves need to be disrupted.
- bowlofpetunias 12y ago
  Why replace something that works and can be systematically verified for something that will lead to all kinds of complications and may be outdated in 5 years? Sometimes something that just works doesn't need to be disrupted.
- Xylakant 12y ago
  > But why require every car to have this bulky fixed function meter device when a smartphone app can do the job just as well? Can it? How can us be certain that the smartphone is actually the one that was in the car when the rate was approved? How does "fixed rate advertised on the outside of the car" match up with ubers surge pricing? Why does a rule that the majority of the population evidently feels comfortable with need to be disrupted? I don't think disruption is necessarily a good thing. It can be, but it also can bring a ton of negative results.
- dalke 12y ago
  "Just as well" in all factors? What's the audit trail for smartphone app? Can modifications to the app be detected, or the app replaced with a real-looking fake app which favors the driver? Might the driver have two smart phones, one with real app and another with a fake app, and choose one based on the likelihood of not being caught? Those scenarios are much harder to pull off with a "bulky fixed function meter device" designed to be inspectable.
- 12y ago

hellbreakslose 12y ago

Taxi drivers should consider reducing their prices if they want their business to go up. Sorry but I don't think am the only one that thinks taxi drivers average salary is way higher than any software developers... Think their salary is un-taxed... most of it.

timr 12y ago

I'm not sure I believe as strongly in the idea in places like London, where the official cab service is both highly regulated, and quite good. In the US, the regulations for cabs tend to do little but drive up medallion prices. Uber cars are a much-needed disruption in terms of availability and quality, but you still can't really say that the drivers know much of anything about the city. If we had the equivalent of a London cab here in SF, I'd always choose that over Uber, yet I think you can probably undercut the price of an official taxi in London simply by ignoring the rules. That seems wrong. If unregulated competition kills a good taxi service, that seems like a drastically different outcome than what's happening here in the states.

atmosx 12y ago

Sad to see the taxi drivers. What they don’t understand is that soon they will be obsolete. As many other groups. IT startups are extremely disruptive and changes like these are hard to stop. With Google driverless cars around, it’s safe to say that in 30 years no one will need a driver. Uber and competitors could just buy driverless, extra-comfortable cars and get over with. The problem is, what do you do with thousands of people working today as cabbies? Or you don’t give a shit about a large % of the population not having an income (and thus not being a consumer).

vdaniuk 12y ago
Who is that "you" that is supposedly don't give a shit? What's even more important, the tech disruption is coming to the vast range of industries and many jobs will be obsolete much sooner than most expect.
- atmosx 12y ago
  Sorry, might have made it clear. By 'you' I was referring to governments. What do you do as a government.
  - vdaniuk 12y ago
    Cab drivers is just one small segment. That is a very good point to consider and even we, as a collective hivemind, on the HN don't pay enough attention to the problem of extreme rate at which jobs will diminish in the future. Start-ups won't solve that. If we don't find a scalable, sustainable, viral business model to disrupt capitalism and focus on positive externalities humanity may be heading for a disaster and this one won't be a surprise.
archagon 12y ago
30 years?! Good luck with that. Manual cars will be around for a long, long time.
- atmosx 12y ago

s_dev 12y ago

Taxi's in Dublin have been a problem for a long time especially for people with up the socioeconomic ladder. The quality of the vehicles can vary as well as the manner of the driver. Regulation states the vehicles have to be clean but the driver is welcome to wear whatever they like and they often wear tracksuits and often espouse racist views (especially against Nigerian taxi drivers) which undermines the perceived professionalism of the industry here. Uber has really taken off here in part because the taxi industry wasn't catering to this need. I do believe Uber is following the rules because they aren't a taxi service. They can't pick up people who flag them down off the street. They really are just a very sophisticated private car service and shouldn't fall under taxi regulation. Since the credit card details are held by Uber it also ensures the passengers behave themselves unlike in normal taxis where drunk or rowdy people vomit or make a mess in the car putting the driver off the road for the night making the entire taxi service somewhat inefficient.

jsudhams 12y ago

Not sure about the UK cabs way of work. But what stops them being a UBER cab driver as well? Isn't it a additional channel? Like in radio taxi can't they simple make themselves busy when they get UBER call so that the cab company does not assign them any additional pickup/drop?

dagw 12y ago
At least in Sweden, to be a cab you have to clearly mark your car as a taxi, clearly post your rates in the window and have a verified taxi meter in your car to make sure you actually charge the posted rates, and Uber doesn't want to do any of those things.

arb99 12y ago

More people have heard about Uber thanks to these strikes than they ever would have (for the time being anyway...)

bowlofpetunias 12y ago

It's interesting how the tech start-up community suffers from the same inability to shift perspective that Microsoft had when it became a powerful megacorp but still saw itself as the underdog. Uber is not the plucky little start-up going up against big, slow incumbent corporations, like many tech start-ups did in the past. Uber is the heavily funded 800-pound gorilla going after the livelihoods of the little guy. So yes, some taxi-markets could do with changes, but the heavy handed and callous approach of greed-driven "disruption" is totally out of place here. We're talking ordinary hard working cab drivers, not fat cats in the boardroom of MegaCorp. If anybody wonders where the growing hate against the tech community comes from, they may want to start looking in the mirror. There's a difference between arguing that innovative disruption may temporarily cause some pain and openly pissing on those who find themselves on the wrong side of that change. There is way too much of the latter going on here.

collyw 12y ago
I guess you haven't had the misfortune of being ripped of by London taxi drivers.

_pmf_ 12y ago

Why should we be excited for some US company siphoning off money from people who are already at the lower end of the wage scale?

avz 12y ago

It boils down to the simple question: Would you rather live in a world where the service, its quality, reliability, cost and professionalism is that of the current taxi services or the newcomers like Uber? I have personally been ripped off, deceived about the route and pricing and forced to put up with rude drivers and operators so many times and in so many places that I cheer any competition, be it public transport or car sharing.