Taking the Gran Via and Paseo de Gràcia already seems like a trifle. Catalan taxi drivers are now well disposed to sow chaos throughout Spain, to take over stations, airports and other nerve centers in the country. The slow march that they mounted this Wednesday in the center of Barcelona was nothing more than an embellishment of their words, their particular way of emphasizing that they are not going to bluff. In reality, the latest episode of the taxi war is not being fought on the streets, but in offices, in a lot of offices.
“All the big cities in the state are about to explode,” warned Alberto Álvarez, alias Tito, from Élite Taxi, the main association of taxi drivers in the Barcelona metropolitan area. At the moment the situation is nailed to that of July 2018, when everything exploded and here in Barcelona an indefinite strike took place in the sector that later spread like an oil stain throughout the national territory. I am getting signals from all the big cities that if next Tuesday we do not have an agreement with the Ministry of Transport there will soon be massive mobilizations throughout the State, at airports, within cities, at stations and wherever necessary. And Barcelona will once again be a benchmark for the struggle of taxi drivers from all over Spain”.
Yes, the truce for the Catalan taxi drivers is tremendously tight. The representatives of these professionals will meet again with those of the Ministry of Transport, as they did the day before yesterday, this coming Tuesday.
And they hope that then the central government has already taken the first and most pertinent steps in order to finish transferring to the autonomous communities and local authorities all the necessary powers so that they can forever shield all the restrictions on cars with a VTC license, to rental vehicles with a driver, to those who come looking for you when you use the applications of Cabify, Uber, Bolt...
All this is a consequence of the ruling of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) that was announced last Thursday. Basically, the ruling in question establishes that administrations cannot restrict the activity of VTCs in order to protect the economic viability of the taxi. That it is a public service does not justify such a privilege.
They can, however, restrict the activity of VTCs, according to other criteria and objectives, such as environmental protection or the improvement of urban mobility. This ruling refers to a regulation of the Barcelona Metropolitan Area (AMB) that is no longer in force, but its jurisprudence is applicable to the regulations currently in operation.
And since the texts of the CJUE tend to be as liberal as they are ambiguous... Well, everyone finds a thread to pull, a thread conducive to their interests. In the same way that taxi drivers pressure the central government to transfer to the autonomous communities and local entities the ability to give their main competitors a coup de grace, the owners of the licenses for rental cars with drivers and the large platforms Digital companies that provide them with their applications currently have a legion of lawyers looking for arguments to make politicians see that if they dare to put more sticks in their wheels, it is very possible that they will end up breaking the law. In addition, very soon, a lot of VTC license owners will queue up in court to be allowed to return to work, albeit in a precautionary manner, and many will also request compensation from the administrations.
Barcelona, the city that hosts the ISE, Sonar, Mobile, Primavera Sound and an abundance of cruise ships and tourists is at stake. It is a very succulent cake, the great city where the great digital transport platforms were left with honey on their lips. Here, in this tense tug of war, the latest episode of the taxi war is now being fought.
