Uber and their Taxi friends

Most Parisians I know love Uber and despise taxis : “they’ve been offering a shitty service for years and now they’re complaining about Uber ? Good for them !”

Whatever the level of (ok, shitty) service that taxis provide, I find their outcry justified.

Imagine a nice taxi driver. Yes make an effort ! OK, that taxi guy borrowed €200K to buy the right to drive passengers around. And one day, it turns out everyone can get that right for free. He could be bankrupt soon.

You may answer that he shouldn’t have invested in that nasty monopoly. But come on, it’s a state organised monopoly, you cannot blame uneducated people for having invested in it.

The solution of trying to slow down Uber’s innovation or make it less useful — as the government tried when imposing a 15 min minimum waiting time before pickup — is plainly stupid. This just destroys value. Penalizes everyone for the sake of a minority. Just like when France’s former Culture Minister proposed to forbid Amazon to offer free shipping to defend ailing booksellers.

What we need to stop is not Uber, but the dumb monopoly of passenger transportation. Chauffeur is a very basic job, it should be available to everyone.

So how can we end the monopoly ? Who should pay the price ?

• Taxi licence holders should probably pay a small fraction of the cost, but not all, it’d just be unfair
• I guess we should immediately stop issuing new taxi licences. Some backward people will continue using taxis for a while, so making supply scarcer will compensate the bleeding of customers to chauffeur apps, and maintain licence prices
• If this is not enough, maybe chauffeur apps could be forced to buy back taxi licences, at a ratio proportional to their activity ?

I don’t know the issue well enough to keep on proposing solutions, but it’s certainly interesting to learn how to properly end monopolies… because there are many others on the list. Think driving schools...