Taxi drivers in the Barcelona metropolitan area don’t want people to hate them, so they are toning down their future protests. In the end, the taxi drivers of the metropolitan area will not unleash chaos during the return operation, they will not block the port, the airport, or the roundabouts on the days when a large part of the citizenry returns to their daily duties after their vacations.
This was announced this Wednesday by Alberto Álvarez, alias Tito, from Élite Taxi, the main association of taxi drivers in the metropolitan area. Instead, to unleash chaos, they will mount a slow march on September 5, between Plaza Espanya and the Parliament of Catalonia, a protest that is always colorful and striking and appears in the media, but whose affectation on the everyday life of people is rather relative.
In any case, the discomfort in the union is very great, and the new course is presented with a few very thorny fronts. The sanction of 122,910 euros that the court of the Catalan Competition Authority (ACCO) filed this summer against Élite Taxi for boycotting Uber opened a new front in the taxi war.
The payment of this fine could trigger the end of the entity. And the group of taxi drivers assures that they did nothing other than inform their colleagues of the damage that working with the application of the San Francisco multinational could entail for the profession. “And now the legal services of the Generalitat – says Álvarez – request the inadmissibility of the special appeal for the protection of fundamental rights that we have presented. We have no choice but to raise a protest.”
Furthermore, taxi drivers in the metropolitan area are still waiting for administrations to take action against taxi drivers who try to rip off tourists by quintupling their fares one way, a practice that tarnishes the name of the profession.
