Uber left Finland last summer due to the harassment from the government and police, but it still made huge difference to the Finnish taxi system.
Before the taxi rides were expensive, service was mediocre and there was no apps nor anything else. After Uber started mixing the market, many new companies have started operating in the field offering travel packages etc. and almost all taxis can now be ordered with an app and people can see their location in real time.
Only thing that hasn't changed is the pricing (taxis are extremely expensive in Finland) but thankfully that's about to change soon.
Taxis aren’t that expensive in Finland compared to other Nordic countries or countries with similar living costs as Finland.
Swedish taxis are unregulated and there fares have risen faster than in Finland.
And Uber as a ride hailing service was perfectly legal in Finland. The issue was they were hiring drivers that didn’t have taxi permits (and didn’t pay taxes).
C'mon. Getting a taxi permit in Finland requires taking a bunch of mandatory courses on highly Uber-relevant topics like "how to use your taxi meter" (185 EUR) and "local navigation without a GPS" (260 EUR), then passing an exam with questions like "from memory, name all roads between random location X and random location Y", meaning you're looking at a bare minimum of 700 EUR and several weeks of full-time study to get licensed: https://taksikoulu.net/kurssit/#hinnasto
And Uber was way (as in, 30-50%) cheaper than taxis while it operated in Helsinki.
Uber is cheaper because Uber's investors subsidize each ride. Don't let this fool you. Uber will get a lot more expensive when those investors want to see returns.
Uber's prices will remain competitive so long as there is healthy competition. If Uber is able to establish a quasi-monopoly in a particular market, then prices will rise.
You’re confusing taxi driver’s permit (which requires exams, not courses) with a taxi licence/permit. Uber drivers didn’t have either and the latter is where the law is very strict. Licenced taxis pay much higher insurance and the cars have to be inspected more often, meaning the costs of a legitimate taxi business are much higher than unlicensed Uber drivers.
> Licenced taxis pay much higher insurance and the cars have to be inspected more often
I have yet to visit a city where these inspections and insurance premiums seem a reasonable cost-benefit trade-off for the median rider. The long-term competition from ridesharing, and lack of prevalent organized rider (versus driver) opposition to it, corroborates that observation.
Such permitting is a crony capitalist scheme to protect the existing taxi drivers at the cost of those wishing to enter into or compete with the industry.
See also cosmetology licenses in many states in the US, which are just dumbest thing.
If the pricing of taxis is correlated with local purchasing power, taxis are almost (#2 or #3) most expensive in the world in Finland.
It doesn't matter if the prices increase or decrease. The price will get adjusted according to the market needs IF there are no other regulations or interferences. If the prices increase, it means that there are other regulations or restrictions in place which are not publicly known or people don't have a need for taxis in Sweden. The former assumption is probably correct one in this case.
Outside of North Europe in countries with similar living costs as Finland taxis are still much cheaper like Israel or Japan even though their taxi markets are also regulated.
Also in Finland car purchases for taxi drivers used to be subsidised with tax money resulting in most of the taxi cars being expensive luxury cars like Mercedes', Teslas etc. Nothing wrong with luxury cars, but most people just wanna get from A to B and not pay fortune for it.
Interesting, I live in Espoo, and usually, I'm hesitant in taking a taxi from Helsinki city center. 20 min ride (17km) costs me on average 45-50 euro. I don't think this is cheap.
It might not be cheap, but it isn't more expensive than in other comparable countries. I've lived in Brussels where it's cheaper to ride a short distance, but as the distance increases the fare is comparable or bigger because the fare/km is higher than in Finland where the pick up fee is higher.
(Finland: pick up 5,90€ + 1,6€/km/1-2 people vs. Brussels 2,40€ + 1,8€/km/1person or 2,70€/km/2 people).
There is no mystery why taxis are expensive in Sweden. Deregulation legalizes price gouging, meaning few people will ride independent taxis or look a new companies. That doesn't just limit competition, but also puts more taxis on the road in relation to riders. Meaning higher costs.
In a regulated market you just, in theory, take the closest taxi because you have no choice. But if there are five companies covering the same area, each company is going to have less coverage or need more cars. Each company is going to have to drive longer to pick up passengers. One company might have no cars available and passengers waiting, while another company has empty cars doing nothing. All in all there is less utilization of cars. I am not sure how big the effect would be though.
That is ridiculous. That's like saying that the food market is more expensive because you can have multiple vendors of food in one area, so it somehow promotes price gouging. I personally like having differentiated choices of food rather than going to the state sanctioned store close to your house because they all have the same things anyways.
> All in all there is less utilization of cars.
Sure. Because there is competition for supermarkets, more food gets wasted. You did not respond in defense of your other point that somehow this would magically raise prices because ???
The food market is more expensive if there are multiple vendors and the customer don't shop around.
The price gouging doesn't come from multiple companies, but from the free pricing. Some independent taxis in Sweden charge 10x as much as established companies. Therefor few people would hail a random cab in the street.
Less utilization means the drivers have to charge a higher price to cover their overhead.
> The food market is more expensive if there are multiple vendors and the customer don't shop around.
Wait, what? The customer is prevented from shopping around for rides? Before Uber, you couldn't call multiple driving services and get a ride. What is your point?
> Some independent taxis in Sweden charge 10x as much as established companies. Therefor few people would hail a random cab in the street.
This makes no sense on the face of it. You could just ask before you get in how much the fare is going to be.
> Less utilization means the drivers have to charge a higher price to cover their overhead.
No, that means they have to drive more and hope they get rides which increases supply and decreases cost. By your logic, the more empty apartments there are in a certain area, the higher the prices for apartments are going to be because of "less utilization" and "covering the overhead".
Taxis were not expensive, they were also easily available and convenient, and an incredible lot of people used them. I mean, you could easily get taxis in the middle of the night in small towns (below 5000 inhabitants) or even more remote villages, and regular low to middle income people would use them with no second thought. Also drivers would not even complain if they called for a short distance trip.
It was a shock for me, coming from France, where nobody 'normal' would ever use a taxi in a 'normal' situation. And if you ever try, you generally do not try again: no availability, extremely expensive price, and generally, as a driver, a moron who complains about you or anything. So most French people only use a taxi every other year to get a ride to the airport, and that habit was so ingrained in me that I never got to initiate taxi rides in Finland because it does not fit in my mental model when I want to get somewhere. But Finns had no such problem :-)
I can't speak for Finland but to me Uber seems similar to Facebook in many ways (though it currently doesn't seem like Uber is as successful internationally):
Taxi apps started out in 2007/2008 according to Wikipedia, most apps I'm personally aware of (in Western Europe) seem to have popped up at some point in 2010, roughly the same time as Uber launched in the US. I remember using a taxi app in 2011 but the signup was too much of a hassle compared to just dialing the local taxi dispatch number for the city. Currently taxi.eu seems to be the most successful brand in Germany but it's still far from ubiquitous. Uber isn't available (except for UberX, which is using a third-party limousine service, and UberTaxi, which is using regular taxis) for obvious reasons.
Facebook expanded beyond English-speaking students in late 2006. Prior to its launch in Germany there were a number of competitors, most prominently StudiVZ (later MeinVZ) which started in late 2005 and targeted German-speaking students exclusively (StudiVZ was obviously drew inspiration from Facebook at several points but I recall similar networks popping up -- and dying -- even earlier than that). There were also more general social networks like Lokalisten (founded mid 2005) and Werkenntwen (launched in late 2006) that also had similar features to Facebook and attempted to build similar online communities.
Many of these sites were initially far more popular than Facebook. Because Facebook wasn't initially available in German, Facebook was simply not relevant at the time. It was just one network among many and it didn't have much appeal.
Over time more people joined Facebook for various reasons and eventually the alternatives faded into obscurity. Many of the networks that were widely known at the time don't even have a Wikipedia article and didn't get much news coverage at the time, so it's easy to forget they even existed. Instead Facebook is credited as having been revolutionary in ways that simply don't hold up to scrutiny.
It seems the perception of Uber is similar to that of Facebook, except the competitors are still around. I don't think Uber was a necessary nor sufficient factor in popularising taxi apps. I'm not familiar with the situation in Finland but considering what is happening elsewhere, I'm not convinced Uber caused taxi apps to become a thing, taxi apps were already becoming a thing alongside Uber and maybe you're just seeing a causation where there's only a correlation at best.
I pointed that out (Facebook even took them to court later on). But I remember running into at least two German equivalents that couldn't be based more on Facebook than merely fitting the description of "MySpace but for coeds".
The point is that Facebook wasn't revolutionary. It just seems so in hindsight because of its success and how much it overshadows everything else.
Everything stands on the shoulders of giants. Sometimes some of the giants get squashed. Sometimes some fall off the other giants. But in the end it's just a massive pyramid of giants standing on each other's shoulders.
Facebook, MySpace, LiveJournal, GeoCities. There was plenty of cross-pollination and incremental changes. Revolutions? Not so much.
Before the taxi rides were expensive, service was mediocre and there was no apps nor anything else. After Uber started mixing the market, many new companies have started operating in the field offering travel packages etc. and almost all taxis can now be ordered with an app and people can see their location in real time.
Only thing that hasn't changed is the pricing (taxis are extremely expensive in Finland) but thankfully that's about to change soon.