Two Uber France managers have been ordered to stand trial to face charges including “deceptive commercial practices” and complicity in illegal activities linked to its low-priced ride-hailing service, the Paris prosecutor’s office said Tuesday.
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Traffic was brought to a standstill across large parts of France in late June when taxi drivers parked their cars in protests and some lit fires along roads in Paris.
In a blog post today (in French), Uber said that it’s suspending UberPop because of the ongoing hostilities between its chauffeurs and taxi drivers.
“We have determined to droop UberPOP in France from 1800 GMT (1400 EDT) this Friday night, primarily to guarantee the security of Uber drivers”, Uber France head Thibaud Simphal advised Le Monde every day, including that some drivers had been targets of violence. Uber insists the French is system outdated and says it needs reform to keep up with technological changes. However, safety must come first. The company has said it would wait for the court’s decision before it reinstated or permanently dropped the service. An Uber spokesman confirmed to The Associated Press that the service is being suspended starting Friday night.
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls has welcomed the suspension of the uberPOP service, but acknowledged that the country’s taxis need to improve the quality of their service. Simphal said almost 10,000 casual drivers in France have subscribed to UberPop and 4,000 of those were working last week when the protests occurred. The news comes after two of its managers in Europe were questioned by police, and taxi drivers rioted in the streets.
While the company says that its “priority now is to get these 10 000 partners back on the road as quickly as possible, potentially as licensed uberX drivers”, it also points out the difficulty of getting that done.
We understand that new technology is disruptive: not just for established companies, but for the people who work in them and their families.
There were reports of suspected Uber drivers being “hunted down” by groups of taxi drivers at Charles de Gaulle and Roissy Airports.
Catching an Uber cab is clearly quite a wholesome affair in France.
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Uber is awaiting a ruling from the French constitutional court in September on the Thevenoud law, which regulates services to transport passengers, Meister said.
