Taxi driver conflict returns to Barcelona

The con­flict be­tween Barcelona’s taxi dri­vers and mo­bile rideshar­ing ser­vices ig­nited again yes­ter­day, with the Elite taxi dri­vers’ union call­ing an in­def­i­nite strike that, as in the last week of July, brought the cap­i­tal’s Gran Via av­enue to a stand­still. The cat­a­lyst for the protest was pro­posed new reg­u­la­tions for rideshar­ing ser­vices that the gov­ern­ment pre­sented yes­ter­day, which the taxi dri­vers claim puts their sec­tor at risk. The taxi dri­vers say they in­tend to con­tinue to block the cen­tre of Barcelona with their ve­hi­cles until the ex­ec­u­tive is will­ing to isten to their de­mands.

The pro­posed reg­u­la­tion says that rideshar­ing ser­vices, known as VTC in Cata­lan, will have to wait for 15 min­utes be­tween tak­ing one job and an­other, and that be­tween jobs they have to re­turn to base or park in a garage and that they can­not use ge­olo­ca­tion to pick up ran­dom rides on the street, as reg­u­lar cabs do.

It was the 15-minute in­ter­val that the taxi dri­vers ob­jected to most, as they want the reg­u­la­tion to stip­u­late an in­ter­val of 12 hours. The dif­fer­ences be­tween both par­ties was so wide that taxi dri­ver rep­re­sen­ta­tives left the ne­go­ti­a­tion table and the protest promptly began. An hour later, the strike had been called after an as­sem­bly of taxi dri­vers held at Barcelona air­port.

Yet, the rideshar­ing side did not like the reg­u­la­tion ei­ther, as they con­sider it to be too re­stric­tive and claim it could lead to com­pa­nies pro­vid­ing their ser­vices to close down. The Unauto union rep­re­sent­ing rideshar­ing dri­vers warned the gov­ern­ment that if it goes ahead with the pro­posal it will have to foot a com­pen­sa­tion bill for the many tens of thou­sands of euros the sec­tor will lose as a re­sult. The VTC sec­tor also claimed the pro­posal flies in the face of both Span­ish and Eu­ro­pean law.