Taxi Driver Online

perhaps not enough signed up for it to be profitable enough or they haven't enough evidence yet

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Taxis Are Public Transport too

Join the campaign to get April fools jokes banned for 364 days a year !

According to the Taxi-Point website over 11,000 have signed up.

https://www.taxi-point.co.uk/post/11-00 ... rogress-in

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IDFIMH

if it was going ahead it would have done so by now I think this is a lame duck case

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Taxis Are Public Transport too

Join the campaign to get April fools jokes banned for 364 days a year !

Further update from TaxiPoint website. Looks like they have received the required financial funding to proceed.

https://www.taxi-point.co.uk/post/14-7m ... adline-set

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IDFIMH

Uber to pay $272m compensation in settlement with Australian taxi drivers

Uber will cough up almost $272m to compensate taxi and hire-car drivers who lost out when the rideshare company “aggressively” moved into the Australian market.

A class action against Uber was expected to go to trial in the supreme court of Victoria on Monday but judge Lisa Nichols vacated it after the rideshare giant agreed to the $271.8m settlement.

It was the fifth-largest class-action settlement in Australia’s history and came after what Maurice Blackburn Lawyers described as five “gruelling” years since it launched the legal battle on behalf of more than 8,000 taxi and hire-car owners and drivers.

The drivers and car owners lost income and licence values because of Uber’s aggressive arrival into the market and the company tried to deny them compensation at every turn, Maurice Blackburn principal lawyer Michael Donelly said.

The supreme court has to formally approve the settlement before it is ultimately paid out.

“To our group members in the Australian taxi and hire-car industry, your story is an Australian story,” Donelly said outside court on Monday.

“You run family, mum and dad businesses, passed down from generation to generation. You have been ... the landing spot for generations of new Australians in this country who have sought to gain an economic foothold.

“When Uber rolled into town, they said the game was up and it was your turn to be disrupted in the new economy – but you knew right from wrong, legal from illegal, and you took action to defend yourselves.”

Lawyers argued Uber X launched in Australia with the intention of hurting local taxi and hire-car drivers.

The company also used unlicensed cars with unaccredited drivers in a “conspiracy by unlawful means”, misled regulators and geoblocked authorities, lawyers claimed.

Lead plaintiff Nick Andrianakis, a former longtime taxi driver, said the settlement agreement was a win for the industry after it was “decimated” by Uber’s actions.

An Uber spokesman described taxi and hire-car drivers complaints, the subject of the class action, as “legacy issues”.

Ridesharing regulations did not exist anywhere in the world when the company started more than a decade ago.

Today, Uber was regulated in every Australian state and territory and governments recognised the company was an important part of the transport mix, the Uber spokesman said.

“The rise of ridesharing has grown Australia’s overall point-to-point transport industry, bringing with it greater choice and improved experiences for consumers, as well as new earnings opportunities for hundreds of thousands of Australian workers,” he said.

“Since 2018, Uber has made significant contributions into various state-level taxi compensation schemes, and with today’s proposed settlement we put these legacy issues firmly in our past.

“We will continue focusing on helping the millions of Australians who use Uber get from A to B in a safe, affordable and reliable manner.”

The class action succeeded where other cases had failed, including some brought in Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia against state governments, Donelly said.

The supreme court is expected to look at an approval application for the class action settlement in April.

Another non-class action proceeding, brought on by Taxi Apps Pty Ltd, remains on foot and is expected to go to trial in the coming weeks.

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IDFIMH

Who writes this complete and utter garbage?

Don't know about the rest of the world, but in the UK it's generally been called private hire licensing.

Pretty sure most overseas jurisdictions have similar regulatory regimes, too

...it's actually a direct quote from Uber, but the way it's presented in the article makes it read like editorial, in my opinion

(Not sure where Sussex's article came from, but it seems based on an agency press release which in my opinion should have used quote marks around the offending passage.)

But which explains why it's nonsense. It's Uber PR, essentially, trying to justify providing an unlicensed service on an industrial scale.

But which is how Uber muscled into many overseas jurisdictions. But by the time they'd landed in the UK, I think they'd had their fingers burnt abroad, basically.

So by-in-large Uber never went down the unlicensed route in the UK.

But the overseas thing explains the widespread urban myth in the UK that Uber's drivers were unbadged, and their vehicles unplated

Of course, that myth is not so widespread now. But it still persists to a degree in below the line comments in press articles, and on social media.

But a persistent question about the myth is whether it's born of ignorance, or whether it's deliberate disinformation, basically

Up to 12,000 now.

https://www.taxi-point.co.uk/post/numbe ... ver-12-000

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IDFIMH

Transport Act 1985 states how ridesharing can be done, Uber does not comply with this thus it is surely operating outside of the Law.

well when you look at ubers history that is what they have always done and to a large extent it's worked for them

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Taxis Are Public Transport too

Join the campaign to get April fools jokes banned for 364 days a year !

Heathcote, by 'ridesharing' I don't think they mean sharing in the sense of the passengers being unknown to each other - they mean sharing in terms of the 'sharing economy' and all that nonsense that came with Uber - it's just made up words making it seem like Uber is something different (like 'ride-hailing', which just means booking a car with an app, as far as I can make out...)

So Uber was part of the 'sharing economy' because the drivers owned the cars rather than Uber, and thus different to the traditional trade, because of course Blueline and Delta own the cars rather than the drivers

So 'ridesharing' in the article just means what we'd call private hire licensing, I'm pretty sure, so for Uber to say "Ridesharing regulations did not exist anywhere in the world when the company started more than a decade ago" is just PR garbage from Uber trying to justify running unlicensed cars rather than the reality of ignoring the law.

And, of course, the way Uber approached things in the UK - a private hire start-up with a global brand, essentially - disproves what they said above.

(Uber have literally tried 'ridesharing' in terms of a unrelated parties in the same vehicle, but if this has worked anywhere I'm pretty sure it's just a niche part of their operation rather than the norm, which again is by-and-large a global private hire operator.)

...anyway, a bit more here about what Uber actually did in Australia as regards ignoring the law. Of course, there are echoes of this in what happened in the UK (particularly in London) but by-in-large across here I'm pretty sure Uber have always complied with the PHV licensing regime rather than trying to run completely unlicensed cars...

(This kind of veers of into stuff about plate/medallion values and the like, but let's not go there )


Uber has settled a class action lawsuit for $270 million – what was it accused of?

https://theconversation.com/uber-has-se ... -of-226505

Who’d want to go back to the days before Uber? The days in which you could never be certain you could get a taxi, the days of long wait times trying to order one on the phone, and the days in which you would never know for sure how your driver would treat you.

So much has Uber improved the experience of getting a ride (young people rely on it in a way their parents were never able to rely on taxis) that it might seem incomprehensible Uber has just agreed to pay almost A$272 million to stop a class action against it going to court.

The $271.8 million settlement is the fifth-largest in Australia, eclipsed only by two for Victoria’s 2009 Black Saturday bushfires, one for Queeensland’s 2011 floods and one for Johnson & Johnson for defective pelvic mesh implants.

So what exactly did Uber do wrong – or at least be so unwilling to defend it was prepared to pay a quarter of a billion dollars not to have aired in court?

The statement of claim presented on behalf of 8,000 taxi drivers and licence holders to the Supreme Court of Victoria paints a picture of an organisation prepared to break the law in order to build a large base of customers it could use to lobby to change the law to make what it had been doing legal.

‘Greyballing’ and ghost cars

The statement of claim points to internal Uber documents that indicate Uber knew in advance of its 2014 launch that its so-called UberX drivers were not licensed to operate commercial passenger vehicles, and that the fines were small.

Its aim was to quickly get to 2,000 trips per week in both Melbourne and Sydney, to ensure it had “as many people as possible to support UberX leading up to what will inevitably be a regulatory fight in both cities”.

Uber told drivers it would pay their fines, and in Victoria paid $1,732 at a time.

The class action said where inspectors tried to collect evidence, Uber engaged in a practice known as “greyballing” in which the apps of selected users get shown a fake view of ghost cars that won’t stop for them.

The claim said Uber also used “blackout geofences” that made it impossible to hire Ubers near the buildings used by enforcement officers and regulators.

Case settled at the last moment

By settling just before the case went to court, Uber managed to avoid these claims being tested, and also managed to avoid the court airing the trove of documents leaked two years ago in which one international Uber executive joked he and his colleagues had become “pirates” and another conceded: “we’re just f***ing illegal.”

Uber succeeded in getting each state’s laws changed, at a cost of devaluing to near zero taxi licences reported to have been worth as much as $500,000 each.

But in its defence (and I may as well defend Uber because it decided not to in court) most taxi drivers never paid anything like $500,000.

And taxis provided a pretty poor service. That’s because the number in each state was limited, which helped ensure drivers had work, but worked against customers in two ways – it ensured there weren’t enough taxis available at busy times, and by pushing up the price of licences it pushed up the price of fares.

Taxis served cities poorly

In a landmark 2012 report, Customers First, two years before the arrival of Uber, former competition chief Allan Fels recommended Victoria issue licences without limit, charging a simple fee of about $20,000 per year for anyone who wanted one.

It’s this recommendation, adopted by Victoria and publicised in other Australian states, that began devaluing licences before the arrival of Uber.

And the Fels report found most of the owners of licences weren’t drivers.

Most were passive investors, some of whom had done well by punting that the value of their licences would rise, and all of whom should have taken into account the possibility the value could fall.

Uber has gone mainstream

Now that Uber has won the right to do what was illegal (and settled a class action that would have exposed how it did it), it has lifted its prices to something closer to taxi fares and allowed customers to book taxis from its platform.

It has become mainstream in other ways. In Australia, it has entered into an agreement with the Transport Workers’ Union on employment, and in the US it wants to work with transport authorities to replace lightly used bus services.

The path Uber has forged – becoming an outlaw, building public support for a change in the law, then becoming entrenched – has become something of a model for new firms in all sorts of other industries, from online gambling, to cryptocurrency trading to footpath scooters.

Uber has shown it works. In this case, the class action has shown that ultimately there can be a cost, but it took a long time and it wasn’t at all certain until the last moment that Uber would buckle.

I've always disliked the phrase 'ridesharing' when it's being used to describe Uber in the UK, for no other reason than rides aren't being shared with anyone.

They are a PH operator like 1000s of other PH operators, albeit a lot larger in respect of vehicles on their systems.

The only way they differ is their way of working i.e. they couldn't care less how many firms you work for, how many hours you work, and when you work.

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IDFIMH

I think the original Uber conception was indeed people using their own cars, rolling them out at weekends to fund their college course, or while waiting to find that elusive book publisher, or while 'between jobs', or as some kind of 'side-hustle'/part-time job. All unlicensed, of course.

Hence the early stuff about the Uber and the 'sharing economy' (sharing personal assets with other people, like Air BnB), and Uber and the 'gig economy', meaning short-term, non-permanent work, essentially, hence the term 'gig' to mean something temporary.

But the sharing economy bit was I think where the 'ride-sharing' thing came from, meaning someone sharing their own vehicle with strangers needing a lift, rather than the passengers sharing a vehicle with other passengers unknown to them.

But, of course, the sharing bit and the gig bit isn't a million miles away from how the traditional trade works.

And once Uber came against the fact that they might not be able to ignore the licensing rules, Uber in the likes of the UK became little more than a private hire operator doing only app bookings.

But I think the stuff about the sharing economy and gig economy was so prevalent among 'experts' and in Uber's PR that its legacy still means that commentators and the like still view the likes of Uber and Bolt as conceptually different.

And why the likes of the BBC still describe Uber as a 'ride-hailing' firm when it recently applied for a private hire operator's licence in Hull - what does 'ride-hailing' mean that couldn't be applied to a mainstream private hire operator? App-only bookings, is about the only difference I can see, correct me if I'm wrong.

Sent this in a letter to the Courier when the Uber stuff was recently being publicised. Not sure if my letter was actually published

And this was actually a kind of explanatory note rather than part of the letter itself


I've never read any definition of the 'gig economy' or 'sharing economy' that couldn't be equally applied to the Dundee taxi trade, which I worked in for a couple of years in the late-1990s. Ditto what I know about the industry elsewhere.

Similarly, the term 'ride-hailing' is probably one of the most common used in relation to Uber, and this seems an attempt to differentiate it from the traditional trade. However, the Collins Dictionary defines 'hail' in this context as essentially synonymous with 'flagging down', thus in the context of an app booking 'hail' is simply meaningless, and indeed misleading. Morever, flagging down, or public hire (technically speaking) is strictly forbidden for Uber's vehicles, which are almost always what are termed 'private hire' vehicles in the context of UK law.

A BBC News/LDRS article at the weekend about Uber applying for a licence in Hull uses the description 'ride-hailing', but also states that Uber is a 'taxi' firm. It then mentions a couple of local private hire firms which accept app bookings, implying that Uber is a different beast. However, if Uber was genuinely a taxi-only firm then it wouldn't in fact need a licence to accept bookings in England, because south of the border there is no third-tier licence required for taxi-only despatch entities (only drivers and vehicles require licences). And in fact Uber is for licensing purposes essentially identical to the two private hire operations mentioned towards the end of the piece, as opposed to the inaccurate 'taxi' description and meaningless 'ride-hailing' term used earlier in this short article:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-humber-68253983