Parisian Taxi Strikes: Tears for a Corpse

If you're going to the airport in Paris next Tuesday, better take the train. 

And for those who live in a French city, be ready to find yourself blocked by rogue taxis who are once again going on strike with a single objective: block transport in your city and paralyze the country. 

It's expected to a "bad" strike: Taxi drivers who defy it risk having their cars destroyed by angry colleagues. And VTC drivers - for companies like Uber and SnapCar - will again be the target of that anger: during the taxi strike last summer, VTC drivers had their cars overturned and burned in the streets. Naturally most don't want to take the risk to work during one. Hard to fault them for that.

The taxis are angry because VTCs are taking share of a market the taxis believe should belong to them alone. By hook or by crook there should be no competition. Their shrinking market share must be the government's fault. So like a child who screams in the candy aisle until his harried parents give in and buy him a sucker, French taxis take to street-blocking whenever it suits their fancy. And the sucker often follows. Or at least the specter of one. 

Since VTCs launched in France less than five years ago they have seen incredible growth in a market that had always been a taxi monopoly. At 0% market share in 2011, VTCs now comprise an estimated 25% of total chauffeured transport bookings in Paris and are projected to own a majority by the end of 2017.

People are adopting VTCs en masse because pricing is transparent, quality generally high, and because they prefer a service that takes automatic payments and is accessible via the mobile device for no fee. Taxis in France essentially offer none of this.

But instead of adapting and trying to innovate, they've chosen to fight for the abolition of competing services. Forcing the passage of absurd laws like making it illegal for a VTC to pick up a person until 15 minutes after a booking is requested, even if the driver was one minute away when booked. Or forcing a driver to return to his "home base" after every booking, even if that home base is 30 miles from the city center. Or making it illegal to display icons of vehicles on a telephone screen. Yes these all are or were French laws. The taxis lobbied for them and won. Suckers.

But they would be better served to try innovating: In December 2015 the Yellow Cab company of San Francisco - in many ways a virtual monopoly up until 2010 - filed for bankruptcy. Killed off by an intransigent refusal to innovate. 

French taxi unions and companies blame the government for their situation but their history is a sordid one of monopolies, strikes, violence and government coercion to protect their perceived right to control all chauffeured transport in France. Why? Because their system is built on the concept of ever-increasing prices for pieces of paper called taxi licenses. Any competition or increase in supply is a perceived threat to the value of those licenses. 

Yes friends, on Tuesday traffic in most French cities will be blocked for the purposes of increasing the value of pieces of paper. Licenses that were all initially issued free by the French government. 

In their monopoly position for years, taxis have chosen to ignore the simple law of supply and demand and the rule that one must listen to customers. 

But the monopoly is over. Finished. Killed off by VTC players that have become among the fastest-growing companies in France. We can assume it's because these companies have put supply, service and transparency at the heart of their efforts to grow.

Perhaps one day we'll wake up and realize we've been had: that VTCs were just a giant ponzi scheme, the actors sickening charlatans who preyed upon the public at the expense of the incumbents. That's what the taxis would have you believe anyway. Maybe they're right. And maybe one day it will all come tumbling down in a heap, collapsing under the weight of its own lies.  

If that happens people will come back to using taxis, as was their only option in the past: Go out on the street in the freezing rain and hold up your hand, blindly hoping that one will pass by and want to pick you up (good luck with that). And better have cash on hand . Or you can call on the phone for one: he'll only charge you ten euros to come get you, plus the regular fees...if he feels like it. 

The good old days.

Over the last five years VTCs have created nearly 20,000 new jobs in France. In a nation struggling with chronically high unemployment, what industry can say they've so contributed to economic development? Most of these drivers are young men with limited education who come from underprivileged backgrounds. These jobs provide them with an opportunity to improve their lives and contribute positively to society. It is really all they ask for.

This Tuesday the taxi unions will paralyze the country in an effort to put each of these people out of work. "We have taxi licenses and only those with them should be allowed in our profession", they will tell you with a straight face. "We don't need competition, and we don't need any more taxi licenses."

Just where, you might ask, does such a plan leave the rest of us who need to get somewhere?

With every frenzied and hysterical strike the French taxis look more and more like a body in the throes of drowning. Flailing this way and that, sinking ever deeper while trying to avoid the inevitable. What's funny is that it's not inevitable at all, unless they make it so. What's tragic is they seem intent on making it so.

A message for these taxis: "Stop shedding tears over the corpse of a dead monopoly that never served your interests anyway. Stop blocking the country for pieces of paper. Stop trying to kill the modernization of your industry and the employment it creates. People will flock to your service if you innovate to give them what they actually want." 

You have only one option left: Adapt or die.

But I'm afraid that all this will fall on deaf ears, and that on Tuesday hundreds of thousands of French people - and perhaps Courtney Love? - will find themselves once again unable to exercise their right to freely move around due to a taxi strike. We'll probably see images of cars overturned and burned, slammed up against the curb in the midst of tires in flames.

Those who refuse to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it. Here we go again.