Taxis Vs. Uber by Juan Manuel del Nido;

Author:Juan Manuel del Nido;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

These gatherings were seen as culturally frustrating, crowding other urban dwellers out of roads and sidewalks; as economically abusive, inventing both captive markets and their stunted logics by limiting taxi access to strategic places and times, demanding inflated fares in spite of standardized fares across city jurisdiction, and engaging in other exchange practices based on making alternatives unavailable at the needed moment; and as plainly illegal, either by cartelizing access to an official taxi stop legally meant for any taxi to use, or by outright inventing a stop, disregarding public space and traffic laws. Within the industry, access to these stops was understood as a “privilege” to be acquired through a contribution, trade seniority, and/or union belonging. In general anyone could drop off passengers at these hot spots, but only “authorized” drivers could pick up fares. Once, when learning the ropes of the trade, one of the drivers at Dionisio’s picked up a passenger at Aeroparque right after dropping someone off; the following day three taxi drivers turned up at his house to discourage him from doing it again. He believed they had tracked him down by the car plate. I found an official stop by a hospital used only by propietarios, in agreement with a policeman patrolling the area and ensuring nobody else stopped there; but the union or its delegates control most such stops to “keep the trade free of abuses,” as a delegate explained to me. Consistently, it was more often taxi choferes who used them, people driving for someone else and belonging to the union through this employment relation. In any case, this meant the union had a far larger say over who did what or not than the law would have anticipated and probably approved of. It also meant that hierarchies and exclusions internal to the industry, reviewed earlier in this book, extended their logics into spaces, times, and relations outside the trade, creating new hierarchies and exclusions in the image of the trade’s inside.

These logics entrapped residents even when they knew better. Of course, Buenos Aires residents knew to avoid taking taxis in these hot spots: Retiro and Buquebus were both only yards away from main avenues where one merged with the general populace, escaping the captive dynamics these logics required. As for Ezeiza, the international airport, between the sliding doors at the arrivals gate and the stop where these taxis congregated there were usually no fewer than ten private car hires and rentals, buses, vans, and other forms of transportation. Aeroparque, however, was very poorly connected by anything other than taxis although it sat in the center of the city, and here Francisco had twice been refused service by taxis that had just dropped someone off. Although he imagined the hierarchies and exclusions the reader now understands, to passengers taxis were, after all, all the same: the fact that a particular car was not in on the arrangement was not his problem. Also, many of these taxis knew they could expect journeys from

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