From my own personal experience, I have had the following incidents: 1) a taxi driver that took me the long way round from a train station to my home. Thinking I was a tourist, because of my accent, he basically tried to take me for a ride thinking I wouldn't notice. That lifted the bill by 50% compared to the usual price.
2) A taxi driver in Marseille that wouldn't finish the trip until I gave him my phone number. My choice was to either get out in the middle of one of the roughest neighbourhoods of Marseille and try and find another taxi, or hand over my phone number (which he verified by calling me on it before continuing) - I had to change my phone number after that one.
3) Countless occassions of having taxis refusing to take me as a customer because I wanted to go to a part of the city they didn't want to go to. One particular occassion struck me as bad - I had the car door open and one foot off the ground when he realised where I wanted to go and took off. Considering I was a lone 35-yr old woman at the time, dressed in a business suit, he obviously wasn't worrying about his safety.
4) I have a friend who actually works in the Boers (mentioned in the article). When I'm out with him, he won't let me get into a taxi until he's checked the guy's (most taxi drivers are men, and on the rare occassion I've had a female driver, they have been nothing but professional - make of that what you will) papers and flashed his badge to keep the driver on his best behaviour).
5) If I move my grievances out to people one removed from me (ie people I personally know), you can add in a guy getting physically hauled out of a taxi and beaten by the driver because the driver didn't want to go where he wanted, another guy getting hit by a taxi when walking across a pedestrian crossing, only to have the taxi driver get out of his vehicule, abuse and kick said friend for slowing him down, and then driving off, and a taxi that took off with a friend's luggage in the boot, which he never got back.
So yeah, I have about zero sympathy for French taxi drivers - the sooner they're run out of business, the better. Their latest behaviour has just confirmed for me that I won't ever be using one again if I can avoid it.
Taxibeat is an app you can use to call taxis from your smartphone. You may choose which taxi you want from the list of nearby drivers. For every driver you see his/her name, plates number, car, reviews, whether he permits pets, speaks foreign languages, has wifi, permits smoking, can help people with disabilities etc. Also you can pay with paypal or credit card.
When you take a ride, taxibeat's driver app essentially monitors the ride.
What's interesting is that since the taxi drivers that choose to work with taxibeat know what a smartphone is, know about reviews etc, they are in general very professional and I never had any issues with them, in contrast with the rest. Of course that they are accountable to a company that takes seriously its name, also helps.
The idea went so well that now we have a competitor too, taxiplon, which also works with phone calls.
Uber's app is just the missing link. I don't understand how you still have to order a taxi with a phone call in 2015.
I paid by card for a taxi journey back after a night out drinking here in the UK. The next day I discovered that he'd added more than 25% on as an admin fee, but by that time, there was no way of me easily tracking him down.
I'll be happy when all shuttle services are peer reviewed.
On a side note, why are the taxi drivers allowed to block access to an airport? If members of the public did this then surely there would be action to remove the people and their vehicles? What makes taxi drivers immune to this?
The best part: Uber is managing to address problems people have been wanting to address for decades but been unable to, as those strikes can be politically devastating.
I bet the government is privately patting themselves on the back that a nice, foreign entity is willing to take the heat and provide the hammers for taxi drivers to keep driving those nails deeper into their own coffins.
When a taxi driver gang is beating up an UberPOP driver or burning his car after turning it over, the average French citizen is seeing himself, an average dude just trying to sweeten his end of month by driving people around, and the commercial dispute becomes a crusade of the right of the common man versus a gang of uncontrollable bullies. Well played Uber, amazing PR.
Everyone I know who lived here before Uber/Lyft has a story about going out to the bars, calling a taxi, waiting two hours for it to come, and ending up walking two more hours home because the taxi never arrived. And I'm sure many more people have had the same experience and simple chosen to drive drunk. It's quite literally a publicly safety issue. Luckily Uber and Lyft came along two years ago and are now operating legally.
The #1 thing we've all learned from this debacle is that many, many cab companies are the scum of the earth. To be fair, though, some are still good. In Chicago, for example, you can hail a cab without even trying. You can go to the bathroom and find a cab waiting for you in the toilet. They are everywhere, they are reasonably priced, and they know the city a hell of a lot better than most Uber drivers. They continue to thrive because they are full time professionals who provide a better service than Uber and Lyft. That's a lesson the drivers in Paris and Pittsburgh need to learn.
Given the "god view" incident and the "let's follow journalists" incident, that's something that Uber didn't disrupt.
I always thought the cabs in Philly were bad. Apparently they're decent, comparatively.
The hotel was about 5 miles from LAX. First the taxi driver suggested I might be able to take a shuttle bus (I had just landed after a 16 hour flight and didn't want to figure out and wait however long for that) and after persuasion agreed to take me. He had no idea where the household-name hotel was, so I had to give him directions from Google Maps. For that 10 minute trip I paid $25 + tip.
On the way back I took UberX, the driver was a lot friendlier and even helped to find which terminal I needed as I had no idea. Total price $6.50. I gave him a five stars and $10 tip as he was great.
I can understand the financial hardship brought by Uber and the frustration with the license prices but as a group, they have not endeared themselves to me and none of my friends have generally positive experiences with them.
It's high time a service like Uber which penalises drivers for bad experience exists.
In Poland Taxi market is almost non-regulated. Taxi driver must pass medical examination, both physical and mental health is checked, plus there are a few other reasonable requirements.
As a result of this, in Warsaw there are more then 20 Taxi corporations, plus Uber, plus independent taxi drivers.
The interesting thing is that prices vary quite a lot, since corporations are not competing over prices only. Some corporations have fancy cars, some corporations are more available during high traffic hours.
Taxis offer also side services - if you run out of alcohol during party, the taxi driver can get one for you in 10 min. You have a car, went to bar, drunk to much to drive - no problem, taxi will arrive with another driver, who will drive your car home.
I understand that governments are regulating explosives production, but why the hell they mess with something so simple as driving people from place A to B is beyond my imagination.
"they've ambushed our car and are holding our driver hostage. they're beating the cars with metal bats. this is France?? I'm safer in Baghdad"
The taxi geniuses even beat up an uber _customer_ for daring to use uber instead of being content with NOT using a taxi, as thee taxis were on strike! Well done!
If this was a joke, I wouldn't believe it! Comedy gold!
The number of industries in the United States which are regulated is staggering, I can only imagine the same is true elsewhere. Regulating industries is a good idea but not if it prevents competition. Regulation is meant to protect the consumer, not the business from competition and the need to maintain if not improve service.
This is the precise root of what has been described as the inherent French melancholia. And this is why Uber is a problem here, even though most French people would recognize it's a great service that actually brings something much needed to the table.
Having centralized live tracking of every aspect of the taxi service actually make things easier to regulate, not harder.
Stories about bad Beijing taxis were everywhere, but they do not reflect my experience. I used taxis on a daily basis for well over a year, and never had the driver try to cheat (the worst experience being that a Xiali with no air conditioning is not fun in the summer). This might have something to do with myself being about 30 cm taller and 40 kg heavier than the average Beijing taxi driver. The drivers might refuse to drive to the suburbs because they can't get a paying ride back, though. But that's upfront refusal, not cheating.
In Helsinki (or Finland in general), the taxis are not cheap but they are very reliable. You could give them your wallet and keys and pass out at the backseat, and find yourself in your bed in the morning, with your money left, minus ride price, and a receipt.
Stockholm, on the other hand, is Wild West, particularly regarding pricing. Check, really, before you take a ride.
Paris experiences: nobody suggests just flagging a random taxi, everyone recommends to call a known company. When I've flagged a random taxi, the service has been unenthusiastic but not disastrous.
Berlin/generally Germany experiences: very good and reliable.
U.S. experiences: how the F am I supposed to know what is the right amount to tip? That is infuriating. I just avoid anything where the tipping rules are not clear.
(I don't know if that's a formal guarantee but it's my experience)
Or, you know, just get the bus, it's cheaper (not always possible, I know)
But yeah, it seems they just began digging their own grave.
Meanwhile in "technology driven" Germany Uber has been banned
The verge article stated that costs for licenses can be nearly quarter million. How is that even remotely reasonable to anyone?
Also not very a response but Uber is kinda of fucking every laws aswell so even though the service is better and cheaper, so is my Nike made by children, it does not mean we need to make children work again for peanuts.
On the other hand having services like uber breaking regulations might end up making taxis less safe and with a worse quality of service down the line as prices keep plunging due to the heavy unregulated competition.
I think the right move would be to open the market while still heavily regulating them but I don't know how the government can convince the taxi drivers to accept that since it would mean losing their super expensive license. I suppose the government could buy the licenses itself but that would be heinously expensive (and as a tax payer I can't say I would really like that).
I really wish the government wouldn't have allowed for this license market to exist in the first place, it was obviously going to create a cartel.
So even if there's 20-25% of people voting FN (the racist party) in France, the percentage of people with a relatively lower level of education is much higher.
And the other aspect of this is that people tend to not often talk with people of lower socio-economic level so talking to Taxi driver is one of the few occasions where people end up talking with people with drastically different level. (The same effect also happens in Hair Salons).
I also have a laundry list of complaints about Philly cabs, but I've never been anywhere where I felt the cabs were definitively better. Compared to some of the other things on this thread, my most consistent complaints are relatively minor (won't take credit cards, don't have the AC on, etc.) At least they are omnipresent, and never say no to my destination. Almost every time I call for an Uber an open cab rolls by first. If Uber shortened their cancellation window, I probably wouldn't even try to use it at all.
That's what Paris needs, from the sound of it. Pittsburgh just needs competition, which we now have. The cabs haven't gotten any better, though. They still effectively don't exist, I almost never see one, and as far as I know they continue to almost exclusively serve the airport...probably because, until recently, Uber and Lyft weren't allowed to pick up riders from the airport. Maybe Yellow Cab will start improving their service now? But I doubt it.
In Greece it is very common for the driver to engage in small talk with his clients but there must be limits. Once I had an independent driver (not associated with any company) recounting —without me asking— his adventures as a client in the sex industry.