A ruling by Chamber II of the Chamber of Administrative, Tax and Consumer Relations Litigation of the City of Buenos Aires resolved to move forward with more regulations for transportation platforms such as Uber, DiDi and Cabify.
The resolution, which stems from litigation initiated by the Union of Taxi Workers, orders the Buenos Aires Government to advance the regulation of the sector, equating the requirements with those that apply to traditional taxis.
The ruling is part of a long-standing conflict between taxi drivers, the City Government and representatives of drivers and users of digital platforms.
In this context, the court decided to give way to the position of the taxi sector, considering that there was an alleged “illegitimate omission” on the part of the local government in its duty to control these applications.
Uber.
As a direct consequence of this decision, Uber, DiDi and Cabify drivers must comply with new obligations, including obtaining a professional license and taking out specific insurance, requirements that until now were not required under the same scheme as the
taxi service.
The controversial measure
The central axis of the ruling lies in the interpretation of the nature of the service provided by these platforms. While both drivers and users maintained that it was a “private transport” regulated by the Civil and Commercial Code, and, therefore, alien to public transport regulations, the Chamber
rejected that argument.
In its decision, the court established that, in the absence of specific regulations, the activity carried out using digital applications must, in fact, be considered a “passenger transport service”.
Along these lines, he defined the activity as the transfer of people in a vehicle in exchange for economic consideration, framing it within the provisions of the Traffic and Transportation Code of the City of Buenos Aires.
Taxi drivers.
One of the central foundations of the ruling was the “regulatory inequality” between the two sectors. According to the ruling, it would be “unreasonable” to maintain a scheme in which taxi drivers must face strict economic and regulatory burdens, while platforms operate without those same requirements, despite
carrying out a similar activity.
However, instead of reducing regulations and facilitating business, benefiting both drivers and passengers, the taxi driver sector, together with Justice, is directly targeting transport platforms so that they are “equally harmed”.
Now, little will be put on the negative impact that these new regulations could have on the operation of platforms and on the transport offer available to users.
The imposition of higher requirements could substantially modify the operating model of services such as Uber, which until now differentiated precisely because of their efficiency, convenience, flexibility and lower barriers to entry.
