Uber app now upsetting the Germans
The arrival of Uber, the California-based hire-car service built around a smartphone app, is triggering a messy revolution in Germany, the country that led the world in regulation of the taxi industry over a century ago.
Uber scored a minor victory on September 16 when it postponed an injunction to halt one of the two hire-car services it runs in Germany, UberPop, which enables private car owners to pick up paying passengers.
Its other service, Uber Black, providing classy black cars and uniformed drivers, was banned in Berlin, by a court, back in April.
Uber customers get a smartphone app that quotes them a price for a fare, tells them if a car is available, bills their credit card and even shows the route as calculated by GPS.
Giving the Uber app a fake-German name was somehow fitting. Back in the 1880s, the city of Berlin ended gouging by hansom cabs with a fare-stage system. Visiting US novelist Mark Twain was among those fascinated by the coloured maps marking out the stages to ensure no Berlin cabbie ever overcharged again.
Then, in 1891, a German, Wilhelm Bruhn, invented the taximeter, a device to calculate fares by the kilometre travelled, eliminating the kind of surly mutual suspicion between driver and passenger that is still common on unmetered moto-taxis in Asian cities.
Germany regulates taxis strictly today with special drivers' licences and price controls. Even the colour of cabs - beige - is defined by law.
UberPop, known as UberX in the United States, relied on a German loophole.
A non-profit car-sharing rule allows private motorists to charge casual passengers for running expenses.
A Frankfurt court ruled this month that UberPop drivers are doing their drives for profit, unlike drivers for a popular French-invented car-sharing app, BlaBlaCar, which links riders to drivers and calculates a fair price.
However the court quashed an urgent injunction obtained by Germany's Taxi Cooperative against Uber, saying an order would have to wait until the case had been fully argued and decided in court. That gives Uber a reprieve - which may last many months - to build its business.
Blacklane, a German company that provides chauffeured limousines, invited key players in the Uber fight to have it out with one another at a conference last week in Berlin.
Jens Wohltorf, who founded Blacklane in 2011, counselled Uber not to rub German authorities the wrong way. Blacklane had gone to officialdom and made sure its own chauffeured black limousines for hire comply with all German laws, though they are not taxis.
Before Uber arrived in Germany, the taxi industry had already been split by a German-based app, MyTaxi, that allows passengers to hail a cab using a smartphone display.
Some taxi-drivers cancelled their contracts with old-style telephone dispatchers and now rely entirely on MyTaxi to pick up business. MyTaxi was taken over this month by Daimler AG. It is legal but resentments remain from the bruising fight to establish it.
"They're now our rivals," said a traditional Hamburg taxi driver, referring to taxis that cruise with the MyTaxi logo painted on them.
Sabine Toepfer-Kataw, a regulator for the state of Berlin, predicted telephone dispatching might one day die out as new technology takes hold but she said demand would always remain for licensed taxis with certified drivers.
The German people preferred a system where authorities protect them from excessive prices.
"Our job is to lay down the framework," she said.
