Uber now has to wait 15 minutes before picking you up in France

Presumably, the taxi industry is "heavily regulated" for the benefit of the customer, then shouldn't customers flock to this excellent, regulated service on their own? Why are those artificial and arbitrary limits necessary?

&quot;Back in October, the French government mentioned this piece of legislation as these new services would hurt traditional cab drivers.&quot;<p>So? That&#x27;s how the market and progress works. If a service can&#x27;t stand up on it&#x27;s own, it doesn&#x27;t need to exist.

The smart services will leverage this. &quot;The quickest pickup allowed by law!&quot;<p>Schedule pickups in exactly 15 minutes with one touch. Countdown timer on the app, etc.

...and they wonder why their economy is shit.

<a href="http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tnellen.com&#x2F;cybereng&#x2F;harrison.html</a>

I wonder when they will introduce a bill to force Google to wait 15 seconds to serve search results.

An idea to &quot;fix&quot; this:<p>In the beginning (after signing up) a bunch of orders are created and sent out to the drivers. The orders technically exist, but the drivers are told to not show up right now. Then, at least 15 minutes later, the user can tap a &quot;show up now&quot; button which tells the driver to actually pick up the user. So in the end you have to wait 15 minutes when using the service for the first time, but after that it is a lot faster because the orders created in the beginning can be &quot;activated&quot; immediately.

France is one of the most frustrating countries a young entrepreneur could ever work in. As soon as you find some way to bypass the rigidity of the system to create something new, to make life easier for people and actually create wealth, the octopus grows another arm to strangle you with. It just sucks the energy right out of you...<p>The UK may have its problems, but it&#x27;s a breath of fresh air by comparison. It&#x27;s no wonder 600,000 French people now live in London (and that&#x27;s just the ones who registered at the embassy).

15 minutes? That&#x27;s nothing<p>And you&#x27;ll just order it 15min before your intended departure time<p>&quot;In France, you have to pay a hefty price to get your taxi license&quot;<p>How much does a taxi medallion cost in NYC again?

Last October, France passed a bill against heavy discounting on books. They have this thing, to protect the existing market order against the disruption caused by new channels.<p>My first reaction is always to think that it&#x27;s ridiculous; but then again maybe all those measures are only meant to minimize the casualties of progress, more than just being an obstacle to progress.

What are the penalties for ignoring this rule?

Maybe I&#x27;m not as smart as french lawmakers, but I can&#x27;t really figure out how they&#x27;d even enforce this?

Must each taxi driver also be named Harrison Bergeron?

I can&#x27;t wait to see what creative solution all these officials will come up with when people start sharing their self-driving cars.

somehow I don&#x27;t feel that we really need Uber, but simply more taxi plates. Uber is just a radio taxi, it&#x27;s trying to use technology where the problem is legal.

So, can you get BOTH a taxi license and work for Uber ?