In the early weeks of December, around 1,500 taxi drivers around Dublin staged protests against Uber’s introduction of fixed fares. The protests, planned to last six days, were called off, awaiting the outcomes of talks with the Ministry of Transport.
The fixed fare means that a client agrees on a fare before embarking on a journey. Should the meter read higher, due to traffic or adverse conditions, the client still pays only the pre-agreed fixed fare. Effectively, this puts drivers at a high risk of loss, as well as encourages them to work in potentially exhausting conditions, to reach the same levels of earnings as they would have prior to the introduced changes. As around a third of Ireland’s taxi drivers make use of Uber to earn money, this change deeply affects their everyday working lives.
In Ireland, the drivers are not represented by any formal union body, and they are rallying to call on the Government “to intervene and update the existing regulations to outlaw what Uber has done”. Taxi Drivers Ireland said that “after four weeks of warnings, protests, and direct appeals, the Government has failed to take any meaningful action to address the crisis engulfing the regulated taxi industry”.
Some of the protests were confined to strategic areas such as the surroundings of Leinster House, while others, termed “slow protests” involved drivers converging around Dublin Airport, between University College Dublin and Merrion Road, Clontarf, and Phoenix Park and driving as slowly as 20 km/h.
The planned six day protest in Dublin was set to take place around the city centre and the airport, however it was suspended pending the outcome of a meeting. The spokesperson for the Minister of Transport, Darragh O’Brien stated that while the fixed fare scheme is in accord with the present Irish regulations, “she has been engaging with the National Transport Authority (NTA) on the issue and has asked it to conduct a “regulatory assessment of dispatch operator licensing in Ireland” to ensure it is up to date”.
Additionally, Mr O’Brien asked the Advisory Committee on Small Public Service Vehicles (SPSVs), to urgently consider the regulatory position, acknowledging the important work of the taxi drivers. The regulatory model is to be revised, to take into account the changes that have happened within the transport sector since 2013 (introduction of the Taxi Regulation Act), such as the growing role of digital booking technologies.
