It has been barely ten days since Uber resumed operations in Barcelona, and the tribe's media have not missed the opportunity to fuel the fire with the hypothetical re-edition of another "taxi war." I would say that stirring up a new dispute, which could also end with a consequent strike or occupation of the Gran Via, would not be the best idea when facing a serene debate about the coexistence between taxis and new private transport apps. It would be better to look at cities where this marriage between two different ways of understanding mobility works and has already yielded good results for users and workers, which should be the priority for citizens and public administration. Barcelona needs an efficient public taxi system like those in Paris or Madrid, but the fact that in 2019 up to a million users opened the Uber app in Barcelona thinking it worked implies that there will always be a demand in the city that must be met in the name of free competition.
Let's travel, for example, to our beloved New York, where a 2015 study by the FiveThirtyEight portal showed that, while traditional taxi drivers worked mostly and normally in the business and commercial areas of Manhattan, Uber drivers had taken advantage of congestion and stagnant supply in the city center to try to catch more pickups in neighborhoods like the Bronx, Brooklyn, or Queens (of the 4.4 million trips Uber made in New York between September and April 2014, 22% started outside Manhattan, compared to 14% in 88.4 million taxi rides that followed the same pattern). Thus, in a liberalized environment, new apps can offer a service that, due to spatial excess, taxi drivers could not monopolize even if they wanted to. In this case, demand has distributed the game, lowered costs, and increased the service capacity for users with two options to choose from.
With this liberalization of competition, as any visitor to New York can see and contrary to what the most apocalyptic sectors of the taxi industry also said, yellow cars can still be seen working in Manhattan (and the other boroughs of the city). The taxi has not become extinct and the other mobility apps have allowed for job creation and offered more services to users: in a benchmark study from 2017 applied to 50 US cities between 2009 and 2015, Oxford economist Carl Benedict Frey showed that the emergence of Uber had not caused a significant labor impact on the taxi sector. Far from it, Uber doubled profits in most cities where it set up shop, but the taxi sector increased by 10% in new licenses. In all cities where platforms have diversified the market, Uber has a greater circulation space, for example, during the hours when taxi drivers change shifts. Users, in short, adapt to the availability of the offer.
This is information, I insist, that has already been multiply documented in many places around the world and, particularly, in cities that Barcelona should resemble (even more so in times of Covid-19 when travel for health reasons to hospitals far from the center or for bubble reasons, at a family or cohabitation unit level, will still be common for months). That the 70,000 licensed taxis in Spain will no longer be able to meet the existing demand in Spanish cities is a fact that not even the most recalcitrant unionist can dispute. In turn, excluding taxis from the collaborative economy is also an aberration for those who find in Uber or Cabify a temporary occupation or a work supplement that, in any case, will always be better than being unemployed. If one thinks of workers' solidarity, there is no better idea than opening up a market that until now has fallen under the clutches of a monopoly that, I insist, we do not see in any other sector.
The problem, the reader will know, is the concern of many taxi drivers for licenses they bought years ago at quite high prices and which (following the capitalist speculation that so many union members condemn but practice in the most literal way) they would now like to sell to ensure a good retirement. Indeed, as the Economic Sub-directorate of the CNMC recalls, between 1987 and 2016, the value of a taxi license in the secondary market has increased by 503.7%, a figure that contrasts with IBEX-35 companies, which have only inflated (sic) by 233.7% during the same period. When it comes to eliminating an unjust system that perpetrates the worst form of speculation (namely, an economy that grows simply by being protected by state bureaucracy), this columnist would simply opt for eliminating the license system, replacing it with a regulator's card that would control the fundamental requirements a driver must have to perform said task.
Given that liberalizing markets is a sin and that the administration has not had the courage to stop speculation with licenses (in fact, in practice today taxi drivers have not bought them from the State or their municipality, but have already acquired them at an inflated price from a retired colleague), economists like Juan Ramón Rallo have been inspired by the Australian model to propose a system of sector liberalization accompanied by compensation for licensed taxi drivers. In cities like Melbourne, taxi drivers have received from 20,000 to 175,000 Australian dollars if they bought their license after 2015. In Spain the amounts would be somewhat lower, as the average taxi license fluctuates around 105,000 euros, and the total cost of the sector's "rescue" would be about 1,500 million euros. Rallo himself has proposed various ways to cover that amount, such as a special tax for new licenses or a temporary surcharge of 5% on taxi and VTC fares.
The problem, the reader will know, is the concern of many taxi drivers for licenses they bought years ago at quite high prices and which they would now like to sell to ensure a good retirementAll of this, I insist again, are data and proposals that date from studies years ago but which the national media debate, addicted to frontism by nature, avoids to resurrect petty battles that help no one.Your server is and will be a user of Barcelona taxis(which, with the appearance of VTCs, have gained in quality with increasingly efficient operators and vehicle locators and with a cleanliness in automobiles that, for anyone who was a user just a couple of decades ago, is obvious), but also wants to travel in Cabify or take advantage of a service ofcar sharing for longer journeys or in areas with less traffic. Is it necessary for myTaxi or Lyft workers to have guaranteed labor rights and for their consumers to have the assurance that they are using a service with guarantees? Absolutely! But no regulation and monopoly typical of 19th-century economies will guarantee it.Liberalization will come, and it is the obligation of administrations to make it as humane as possible.
It is logical that the taxi sector defends itself and that new platforms want to land in Barcelona just as they already do in all imitable cities in the world. The difference lies in the fact that in our city, the Colau City Council, far from anticipating the problem and seeking a concerted remedy between the disputing parties, has done that very "ours" thing of waiting for blood to rush to the river and seeing everything coming from the armchair of Sant Jaume, hoping that the evening breeze will solve everything. In cities where this system has been working for more than six years, someone thought it would be good to get ahead of the problems and dedicate a few hours to thinking about the users. Here you have one who gladly welcomes the liberalization and sings "Welcome back, Mr. Uber" but who will continue to use the public taxis of our city with equal enthusiasm. I am not the only one, fortunately. Administrators, stop fanning the flames and look for solutions, because we are late and the world is moving forward while you take a nap.