Do taxis make peace with Uber?
The partnership will involve over 12,000 taxis of the ItTaxi consortium, which will have the opportunity to work with the Uber platform to increase their business opportunities. But the unions hold back: "It does not concern the entire category of taxi drivers"
If you can't beat them, join them. This seems to be the rationale that led to the agreement between ItTaxi and Uber. But, beware: despite what is being heralded by the general press in these hours, it is by no means a partnership between Italian taxi drivers and the former US startup. It is in fact a contract signed between two private entities which involves, on the taxi side, exclusively the taxi drivers belonging to the consortium.
BECAUSE YOU CANNOT TALK ABOUT AN AGREEMENT BETWEEN UBER AND TAXI DRIVERS
More specifically, the agreement will cover a total of over 12,000 taxis of the ItTaxi consortium, which will have the opportunity to work with the Uber platform in order to increase their business opportunities. These are certainly considerable numbers, but it is not possible to talk about the whole category. According to TrueNumbers , in fact, in 2018, the year to which the latest available data refer, there were 7,703 licenses in Rome alone, 4,852 in Milan. Naples followed with 2,365 and Turin with 1,501. With the pandemic, the number could have dropped further, also because that is the trend of recent years, but these numbers still allow us to understand why we cannot speak of a "historic agreement between taxi drivers and Uber".
WHAT CHANGES WITH THE PARTNERSHIP BETWEEN UBER AND ITTAXI
Instead, it is correct to speak of an agreement between ItTaxi, undeniably the largest Italian consortium in the interconnection between the demand and supply of taxi services and Uber, the global mobility app. The partnership will be operational from June starting in Rome and will be managed at a technical level by Splyt, system integrator. But what changes with the agreement between Uber and ItTaxi? On the customer side of the taxi, in fact, nothing. On the customer side of Uber, they will also find the consortium's taxis among the offers made available. In short, on the taxi drivers side of ItTaxi, their car will enter the panorama of vehicles offered by Uber. An extra showcase.
The biggest difference that could push most people to continue to prefer vehicles registered on Uber will be the fare. The cost of the journey, in fact, will obviously continue to be established on the basis of the municipal rate, that is by means of a taximeter, with the only difference that the payment will take place from the payment card registered on Uber. Therefore, when users choose the ItTaxi taxi, they will not receive the preview of the final cost, as happens with the NCC in the “black” version of Uber, but only a price fork calculated by the algorithm.
In any case, those who join the ItTaxi consortium will virtually be able to fish in the customer portfolio of users registered in Uber: 118 million in the four corners of the globe. Of course, Uber will collect a percentage of each ride concluded through its software, but it is not known how much this will be.
ALL HAPPY?
Everyone gains from it. Everyone happy? Not really. The unions, in fact, do not like the new agreement. They fear that similar partnerships will turn licensed holders into "riders". From the initials Attac then complain that the Competition Bill, where it prescribes "the adaptation of the offer of services to new forms of mobility that take place through web applications that use technological platforms for the interconnection of passengers and drivers" constitutes "an explicit favor to subjects such as Uber, Freenow, as well as companies not yet present in Italy such as Cabify and Bolt and goes in the exact opposite direction to the interpretation given by authoritative judgments – one for all, European Court of Justice, 2017 – which define the platform activities as explicit labor intermediation activities, with the constraints it entails in our sector ". The peace between Uber-like platforms and taxi drivers, in short, seems far from being signed.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/smartcity/i-taxi-fanno-pace-con-uber/ on Wed, 25 May 2022 11:33:25 +0000.