The multinational Free Now wants to make Barcelona taxi fares more flexible and propose lowering and raising the price of the ride based on supply and demand and the state of traffic. The application that most drivers use in the city to find clients as soon as possible aims to offer citizens the possibility of paying a little more in exchange for getting a vehicle at the times when it is most difficult to find it.
In this way, Free Now is committed to establishing changing and dynamic prices, more or less what the large applications that use rental cars with drivers (also known as VTC) have been doing, in the case of Cabify, Uber and Bolt... The difference is that Free Now also proposes setting limits on the corresponding increases and reductions in the price of the race of around 15%.
It is actually quite an issue in the profession. One of the main characteristics of the traditional taxi is that its rates are fixed and regulated by the public administration. They are by no means left happily in the hands of the market. Around 4,000 taxi drivers use this app in Barcelona. About 400,000 passengers use it every year. More or less. Despite this, as expected, Élite Taxi, the main taxi drivers association in the metropolitan area of the Catalan capital, opposes the idea of this multinational. Because many taxi drivers understand that the true objective of this platform is to liberalize the sector in order to monopolize the offer by applying discounts and then increase the commissions it charges taxi drivers for each ride it provides them.
“The taxi has to modernize and adapt to new times,” said Isabel García, general director of Free Now in Spain, in a recent interview with La Vanguardia. And this entails greater flexibility in many aspects. One of them is rates. We propose that it be adapted depending on the state of traffic and the supply and demand of the service. But with limitations, establishing a price range. In no way do we want to do what other applications that work with rental cars with drivers do and that people find that they suddenly double or triple the price.”
The general director of Free Now in Spain also assures that the initiative has been tested in Berlin since the beginning of the year, that they are collecting all the data on its operation and that they will soon send it to the Institut Metropolità del Taxi (Imet) so that it can have it. in consideration. “A similar experience is also being carried out in Madrid, but there we only have lower prices. We must take measures to improve the competitiveness of the taxi. Free Now bets on the Barcelona taxi. We have no intention of increasing commissions and we still do not work with rental cars with drivers. But the imbalances between supply and demand during weekends are very serious. We also have to make the party system more flexible, so that there are more cars on the streets, so that cars can be on the streets for many more hours. Taxi drivers have to be able to decide when they want to work.”
Apparently Free Now has a few studies that illustrate these imbalances between Barcelona taxi supply and demand. At least that's what he says. But he prefers not to go into details. The truth is that applications dedicated to urban mobility do not usually provide much data.
