Spain’s taxi driver strike: a mafia defends its rights
For the second time this year, Spanish taxi drivers held the country’s main cities to ransom, blocking roads, committing acts of vandalism and assaulting drivers legally authorized to carry on working. I’m not sure when the right to strike or protest became the right to attack, to intimidate and to shut down a city, but it is a truly worrying trend and politicians who defend such actions, as some have here, are populist morons. The idea that ”you are going to listen to me because I can bring an entire city to a halt” has to end, because it has nothing to do with defending workers’ rights.
Taxi sectors around the world face a very clear problem: many decades of service regulated by licenses show without a doubt that taxis by themselves are not the solution to the problem of urban transport, which is one that requires increasingly urgent measures. The licensing system, created at the time to avoid so-called tragedy of the commons, was shown to be the only way to allow drivers to make a reasonable living, as well as offering some security and safety. Cities that did not use a licensing system, the most commonly cited of which is Lima — were left as examples of suboptimal, insecure, unpredictable and in many cases dangerous services.
However, technology has changed everything: since the arrival of Uber, an app can replace a license, and in addition, more efficiently. Taxi drivers can say what they like: a trip in an Uber or Cabify vehicle will always be of a higher standard than in a standard taxi: the vehicle is cleaner and the driver tries harder to please. The reason is a rating system. At the end of the trip, an Uber or Cabify driver knows that the service will be scored, and that anything below four stars could mean being eliminated from the platform: it just works. If a taxi driver provides bad service, no one complains, because the system is not designed to record complaints (it can be done, theoretically… but nobody bothers except in serious cases). If you complain on Uber or Cabify, it is looked into, and generally, in addition, users get their fare back.
Apps have proven to be infinitely more efficient than the traditional taxi system, and as a result, many have entered the market, which means that for the first time, a system based on abundance of supply solves transportation problems in cities better than one based on scarcity. Because licensing systems, and let’s not forget this, are based on shortages, which has led to licenses changing hands in Madrid for more than a quarter of a million euros, and in New York, a million dollars. Insane. Experience shows us that the ongoing solution to this problem is not to maintain the licensing system, but to open it up. Restrictions on passenger transport vehicle licenses mean they will skyrocket in price as taxi licenses did before them. The only solution is to eliminate restrictions and allow anybody to obtain one, thus shifting from a model based on scarcity to one of plenty. This can be done gradually and retraining and help for those affected is a possibility, but that raises the question as to whether taxpayers should bail out those who freely chose to invest their money in an overpriced license.
Spain’s taxi drivers have gone on strike simply because they refuse to accept that the game is up and the de facto monopoly their license grants them has ended. Taxi drivers believe their license gives them an exclusive right to transport people in cities, but it doesn’t.
A problem arises when the rights taxi drivers believe to be inalienable threaten the public’s right to decent transportation in cities. The solution is not protecting the supposed rights of this or that collective, but to enable new solutions offering more modern, higher quality, more varied and more versatile transportation systems. The solution to the transport problem in our cities is not and will never be to protect the taxi, but to encourage greater supply. This means a mix of private vehicles, licensed drivers, vans and SUVs taking shared routes, car-sharing systems or car-pooling … everything.
Seen in from this perspective, a taxi drivers’ strike is simply a bid for one collective to hold on to its privileges at everybody else’s expense. So let’s stop expressing sympathy and instead demand our rights are protected against gangsters blocking streets, throwing firecrackers, assaulting people and property and intimidating other drivers from earning a living. The truth here is that taxi drivers have gone from being affected by the advance of technology to being a mafia of the worst kind (link in Spanish… but check the pics!) In saying that I also accept that it is not fair to judge a group on the actions of a few.
The existential threat facing taxi drivers face doesn’t come from Uber or Cabify: but instead from self-driving vehicles, which will be here in about three years, meaning that nobody is going to earn a living driving a vehicle anymore. They think it’s science fiction, but it’s here, and it’s not going to be stopped. Autonomous, transport will be much cheaper, more efficient, and will be offered by platforms regulated through apps. The taxi as we know it today will be a relic of the past, like the horse and carriage, and for a bunch of thugs to try to hold onto their privileges until then through intimidation is unacceptable.
Let me say that I have no ax to grind here: my job is to study technological disruption and innovation. I am simply a professor and not paid to write this or to express a given opinion. I am a professor who at 5 pm on May 30, 2017 needed to be somewhere in the outskirts of Madrid, and could not do so because not only were there no taxis, but there were no other drivers able to take me, because they had been intimidated off the roads.
I was unable to go about my business and whose rights were clearly violated by a bunch of gangsters. This cannot be allowed to happen again. The rights of a few cannot prevail over those of the many. We are not going to solve the transport problems of our cities by keeping things as they are: new solutions and alternatives are needed. The more the better. And if that means the disappearance of a monopoly, that monopoly will have to go, regardless of what some do and say. There is no going back.
(En español, aquí)
