Having escaped one firing squad with today's court judgement, Uber still face the threat of Boris's new private hire proposals.
On the face of it, those proposals would appear not be in Londoners' interests, but then I haven't spent any time getting to the heart of the matter. Does anyone else know the case for and against the proposals?
In the meantime Uber have launched a petition to support their case which at the time of writing has gathered over 130,000 signatures.
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Experienced the Uber service first time on Wednesday evening - friend used them. Excellent experience. They know exactly where you're standing if outside on the pavement for example, which we were. The car arrived there within a few minutes. Knew name of driver and type of car before he arrived. The driver was courteous, knew where he was going, smooth ride and car itself was good. All very impressive.
Black Cabs in the past have been reluctant to go out as far as Harringay & are expensive & not particularly easy to arrange/find. At a recent meeting where the Black Cab drivers were outside protesting Boris was heard referring to them as 'luddites'. Probably a little harsh but monopolies/oligopolies like this are being disrupted like this by new ways/new tech all over the world in many lines of work. Maybe the Black Cabs should create their own app if they haven't already and lower their prices.
I made the mistake of getting a black cab home from Heathrow after a rather exhausting flight from Australia many years ago. I had £50 on me but we had to ask him to stop at an ATM in Camden Town and he didn't bat an eyelid. It's their ridiculous desire to be paid in cash when everyone else uses debit cards that means I don't use them and they're labelled luddites. I used Hailo a bit when it had lots of Black Cab drivers on it and you could get them around Harringay, it was also handy to have on my daughter's phone linked to my debit card.
And of course we need the government to protect us from making a bad decision.
Instead of more regulation and license requirements, there should be options. If you want to save money and are willing to take some risk, you should be allowed whatever option you like.
More licenses, requirements and regulation do not protect anyone's interest but those who are part of the cartel, creating roadblocks for competition. And we all know that, without competition, the quality of goods and services go as low as possible and the price the other way around.
Whilst I'm a fan of freedom of choice, there's also the issue that when things go wrong, it won't just be the individual who took the risk that pays the the price.
Imagine the cost to us all of an unregulated cab service - the price for the family into whose car the unregulated driver ploughs, the cost to the health service who have to look after the passenger assaulted by a rogue driver, the cost of a rise in car insurance premiums as they rise in response to accidents caused by unregulated drivers, etc etc
That's the reason why I am completely against government services.
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