London Cabbies Launch Crowdfunding Campaign Against UberThe iconic black cabs of London are putting up a fight to keep Uber off the streets of the city.
“Action for Cabbies,” the campaign through which the black cab supporters hope to right the slack bestowed upon the San Francisco-based company by Transport for London (TfL), is being powered by a crowdfunding effort, which has been launched to pay for the legal fees required to present the application against TfL for judicial review.
Through its crowdfunding initiative, the campaign is seeking to raise £600,000 (~$850,000) on Crowdfunder in the next two months. So far, it has succeeded in raising 5 percent of its goal.
The supporter group contesting against Uber is being led by by Artemis Mercer, the wife of a London black cab driver, who has emerged as a strong voice of the campaign with her efforts to spread the word across Facebook and Twitter.
“TfL is inept,” said Mercer in an interview with TechCrunch. “They really need to stop faffing around. Bringing in new legislation to cap the amount of new licenses that they’re issuing — I’m told it’s about nearly 800 a week last week. Touting is going on; there aren’t adequate insurance checks or legal background checks with a lot of these PHV [private hire vehicle] new licenses. It’s paramount to public safety that TfL regulates, and they’re not doing that. And they’re operating outside their remit by giving licenses and creating operators who operate outside the legal framework.”
Moreover, Mercer told TechCrunch, black cabs are heavily regulated by TfL for the fare they charge. However, Uber, with its surge pricing model, is not being subjected to the same regulations.
While Uber’s launch in most countries around the world has been met with some level of legal trouble and protests, its opposition in the U.K. springs from its violation of the three-tier system, which requires taxicab services to provide wheelchair accessibility, rigorous background checks on drivers and an expertise on local road knowledge. All of which, Mercer argued, are being violated by Uber.
“The legal framework that’s in place has got public safety at the heart of it. And it creates a two-tier system between private hire vehicles and black taxis. When TfL issued Uber London a license in 2012, they effectively created a third-tier system, so they went from being a law regulator to a law enforcer and acting outside of their remit,” she added. “We’re saying that TfL were wrong in their decision to grant Uber a license.”
source:
http://www.pymnts.com/news/2016/london- ... inst-uber/
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