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by Our Foreign Desk
FRENCH taxi drivers held a nationwide strike yesterday against mobile-phone cab service Uber, blocking traffic in major cities.
Riot police fired tear gas canisters and tried to catch strikers as they ran onto Paris’s Boulevard Peripherique ring road near a main route into the capital.
Drivers set up blockades and burned tyres in the streets of Paris, Marseilles and other cities.
Images from around the city captured the taxi drivers’ anger. One shows an overturned Uber car and others with tyres slashed and windscreens smashed.
Taxis and other vehicles were plastered with posters reading: “Uber go home” and “Je suis taxi.”
“Many taxi drivers are infuriated,” said Taxi union FTI representative Abdelkader Morghad.
“We’re demanding that the Thevenoud law, which clearly forbids unlicensed drivers, be implemented. There’s a lack of political will to do it.”
The government said that nearly 500 legal cases had been filed across France involving complaints about Uber.
Officials reiterated concerns about the safety of passengers, insisting that they are not protected in case of an accident by an Uber driver.
Uber’s UberPop service, which allowed users to hire unlicensed drivers, was launched early last year but ruled illegal by a Paris court in November. But Uber is still operating UberPop and recruiting new drivers.
Its replacement UberPool is marketed as a car-pooling service but nevertheless involves payment for journeys.
Uber’s more expensive licensed taxi service is still legal but a source of intense frustration for taxi drivers, who pay tens of thousands of euros for their licences.
The firm’s co-founder Travis Kalanick originally had the idea for the service in Paris in 2008 while trying unsuccessfully to hail a cab.
Taxi service G7 boss Serge Metz said that unfair competition from Uber and similar services was making drivers’ lives impossible.
“This is the first time we’ve had a multinational so cynical that, in every country where it operates, flouts the laws in place and lobbies with an army of lawyers and lobbyists to change the laws to suit its activity,” he said.
