Barcelona (AFP)
Hundreds of taxis marched through central Barcelona, Spain, on Thursday to protest the return to their city of American ride-hailing company Uber, which left in 2019 after a bitter conflict.
Uber launched on Tuesday in Barcelona a new application that allows you to order conventional taxis, holders of a license, without it being a service of transport vehicles with driver (VTC).
After a hard strike by Barcelona taxis, the region of Catalonia had in January 2019 strictly restricted the activity of VTC, which had led to the departure of Uber from Barcelona, Spain's second city very popular with tourists.
But for the Elite Taxi union, at the forefront of the fight against the American firm, the new application launched by Uber "does not respect the tariff regime" imposed on taxis and pulls prices down.
"There are rules and they must be applied (...) to guarantee users that all applications offer the same prices," Tito Alvarez, head of this union, told reporters.
Uber is coming back with this application "like a Trojan horse (...) saying it wants to work with taxis but that's a lie", denounced Luz, a taxi driver participating in the demonstration.
"We are a regulated service with regulated tariffs (...) They want to get into it and change the laws", fears the driver.
At the end of 2017, Elite Taxi had won a victory when the Court of Justice of the European Union concluded that the services of the American giant Uber fell mainly in the "field of transport" and should be subject to the same regulations as taxis.
Uber had already had to suspend its activity for the first time in 2014 in Spain: a judge had banned its service, which at the time put private drivers and users in touch.
It relaunched its VTC activity in 2016 in Madrid, with drivers with professional qualifications, and in Barcelona in 2018.
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