Uber and taxi drivers are no longer what they used to be, thankfully

I remember the barricades, the scuffles, the insults and threats. In Rome, but not only. It was 2015 and the war of taxi drivers against Uber in Italy reached its peak. Seven years have passed and the one signed yesterday by ItTaxi is more than a peace: it is an alliance. From June, there will also be twelve thousand taxis inside the app of the San Francisco company.

In the meantime, the world has changed, but above all the taxi drivers have changed: cornered by the arrival of Uber, they did the only thing they could do. Not the barricades. Improve the service.

Today those who tell you that they don’t have a credit card or that they have a broken POS are a small minority, the others you can often pay via smartphone; to call them, in big cities, a dedicated app has taken the place of the radio taxi which often forced us to wait endlessly. With the same apps it is possible to know who will come to pick you up, on which car, and in the end give a score to the service received; and a tip. In seven years, taxi drivers have done what they hadn’t done in the previous seventy years. But Uber has also changed: the idea that anyone, without a license, could get to be a taxi driver with their own car to round up has been set aside, overwhelmed by contrary sentences but also by more or less serious accidents to passengers. Today Uber has evolved and aims to become a platform for urban mobility in which there are all the services, legal and authorized, available to the citizen, including bicycles and scooters. In the background we can see one day less busy, less polluted, more livable cities.