Getting a taxi at Rome’s main train station Termini these days is a difficult task: the line at the stand is almost endless in front of the station building. Tourists and business people have to wait up to 40 minutes for their turn.
The situation is similarly bad at Fiumicino Airport and taxis are also scarce in other Italian cities such as Florence or Naples. In Milan, in northern Italy, it is often impossible to get a taxi during rush hour: hotline calls often go unanswered.
At the beginning of the week, the Italian newspapers identified the reason for this acute shortage of taxis in the high number of visitors: Italy is currently experiencing a tourism boom after the complete end of the corona pandemic.
In the first two months of the year, 70 percent more foreign visitors came to the country than in the previous year. And the market research institute Demoskopika assumes that from June to September there will be more tourists than at any time since 2000.
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But the many visitors are of course not the real problem, their presence only highlights a situation that has been intolerable for a long time and can no longer be ignored under these circumstances: Italian cities have been missing taxis for years – and neither have the city administrations nor do governments intervene because they don’t want to take on the powerful taxi lobby.
If this behavior has only harmed consumers so far, it could soon be to the detriment of the whole country, because the European Union requires an improvement in internal Italian competition before the money from the EU Corona Recovery Fund is paid out.
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Carlo Rienzi, President of the consumer organization Codacons, describes the situation in the business newspaper “il Sole 24 Ore”: “In the large cities with heavy tourism, the number of taxis should be increased by at least 20 percent.”
According to Rienzi, no new taxi licenses have been issued in the cities for 20 years. “City governments are not getting a handle on this because the taxi drivers are a powerful lobby.”
Mario Draghi’s government felt the power of this lobby in 2022 when it tried to reform the competition law and thus allow more competition in the taxi industry and in the awarding of stand concessions. She was obliged to do this by the EU Commission in return for the payment of the EU billions that Italy was to receive as part of the Corona reconstruction fund “Next Generation EU”.
Taxi lobby calls for protests and blockades
Since the taxi lobby was against this liberalization, they called for protests and first blocked the Roman government district with smoke bombs and choirs reminiscent of football hooligans. Taxi drivers then went on strike in the cities for days, paralyzing part of the traffic.
Because while taxis in Germany are seen more as an additional service for people who want to get to their destination more comfortably, for many Italians (and visitors to Italy) they are an essential part of local public transport: In a city like Rome, there is a tram line has been replaced by buses for years, the top speed of the most important metro line has been reduced to 15 hours per kilometer precisely because the tracks are too old and the buses like to burst into flames, taxis are irreplaceable for many citizens to get from A to B come.
“Rome has probably the worst problems with public transport, but all Italian cities have problems,” says Andrea Giuricin, transport economist at Milan’s Bicocca University. He reports on the disproportionate power that the taxi lobby exerts on political life in Italy: In addition to the taxi drivers themselves, other sectors often show solidarity with their concerns. The common denominator is the license required to operate the business.
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Double boom, inflation help
Because the taxi drivers bought their licenses, which were originally distributed free of charge by the city administration, at a high price: Italian media reports that a taxi license in Italy can cost an average of 140,000 to 160,000 euros and in the capital even up to 200,000 euros. If the market is liberalized, taxi drivers fear losing this investment.
But according to Giuricin, there is no way around it: “In order to improve the situation, the city administration and the government would have to take action. The city would have to issue more licenses and the government would have to open the market to competitors.”
Because although ride apps like Uber are also active in Italy, they are only allowed to arrange rides from licensed drivers. And since their licenses are also very limited, this offer cannot compensate for the shortage.
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However, according to Giuricin, city governments fear the taxi lobby and its ability to shut down the city, as well as its influence in local politics. And the politicians in parliament also removed the taxi industry from the reform of the competition law: Draghi’s government fell immediately after the protests last July. And the new government around Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni shows no signs of picking up the thread again.
“The government is ignoring the issue. The reform of the competition law is the prerequisite for Italy receiving the EU billions, which in turn are essential for economic growth,” says Giuricin. Because the EU Commission is transferring the billions in tranches and only after checking whether Italy has met its reform obligations.
And now this process has come to a standstill: Brussels is holding back the payment of the third tranche. The 19 billion euros should actually have been transferred to Rome at the beginning of the year.
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