100,000 Taxi Drivers in Seoul Planned to Protest Against Ride Sharing App

After the suicide of a taxi driver who set himself on fire to protest the introduction of a ride sharing app in South Korea, 100,000 taxi drivers will surround the National Assembly on Thursday.  I was pleasantly surprised that someone in the media is actually reporting on what I believe these taxi drivers should be doing instead, evolving with the times: 

But taxi drivers say Kakao’s planned ridesharing app steps outside legal boundaries. The app allows users to hail rides at any time of day, rather than being limited to rush hour. 

The app would also charge around 70 percent to 80 percent of the normal taxi fare, which means it could easily take customers away from taxi drivers who are already facing long work hours and small incomes. 

“I’m sacrificing my life in the hopes taxi drivers can earn livable wages one day,” Choi wrote in a suicide note. 

Despite such strong protest from taxi drivers, public sentiment has mostly been in favor of the ridesharing app due to dissatisfaction with the availability and quality of taxi services. It is common for taxi drivers to refuse passengers going short distances late at night, especially in crowded areas of Seoul like Hongdae, Gangnam and Itaewon. 

But the problem can be solved within the taxi business itself, Lee said. 

“We actually have too many idle taxis, so the number of operating taxis in the country is virtually 200,000, not the registered 250,000,” Lee said. “We are working to resolve this by creating our own cab-hailing app that sends taxis to where they are most needed. The app will also hide the intended destination of passengers from the driver, so they can’t pick and choose between passengers.”

Korea Times

You can read more at the link, but there is nothing hard about making a rival app for taxi drivers, the hard part is changing the taxi driver culture which is causing the demand for a ride sharing app in the first place.