Imagine this is your granny speaking:
“Once upon a time in a land far, far away, long ago, lived a German engineer who invented something called the petrol engine. His name was Mercedes Benz (or was that his daughter – it’s so long ago, we can’t be sure). This petrol engine-thingy was supposed to attach to a traditional carriage, in place of the horses we love so much and it threatened to replace them.
“Can you imagine the consequences?
“They say these horseless carriages would have gone faster, been cleaner, cheaper and been generally more efficient. Even that we would have been able to drive them ourselves. Poppycock! The first thing if this petrol engine had ever been allowed would have been mass unemployment of all the drivers of hansom cabs, carriages and footmen. How ghastly for them and their families!
“Then the carriage makers themselves would have fallen idle, to say nothing of the leather-workers who make all our tack – the bridles and reins. Even what our American cousins call their “buggy whips”. Well, of course there’s an entire industry devoted to that.
“The horse breeders, too, would have fallen by the wayside, as would the grooms and even the farms where all our horse feed is grown. Nor should we forget those charming urchins who scurry about our streets picking up the all the horse manure – well, they don’t earn much, do they, but a crust’s a crust, as my father used to say.
“All of this, all, would have gone away if that awful Mr. Benz (or whatever he was called) had been allowed to succeed. I shudder to think what would have happened to the horses themselves – of course, our French cousins would probably have eaten them, but that’s not something we discuss in polite society.
“But heaven be praised, we are able to look back and fondly remember what transpired. All those valiant horse-and-cab men who blocked the streets of cities all over Europe – many other parts of the world, too – and saw off that monstrosity, the petrol engine. Brave fellows, taking on the future, staring it down and making sure that the world remains anchored firmly in the past. Well, I don’t mean it quite that way, do I? I mean making sure that the world remains firmly traditional and that people who have always worked in whatever part of the horse-and-carriage trade continue to be able to do so. They have their investments to protect and we have our our way of life.”
No, this was not your granny and this is not a dream.
What I’ve described above is exactly what took place in a number of European cities this week – and in a different form, in Durban, South Africa. Traditional taxi drivers in London, Paris, Madrid and Barcelona brought city centres to a standstill, blockading rush hour traffic, to protest against Uber.
What is Uber? It’s a smartphone app which allows you to call the nearest Uber-cab, get an estimated fare, pay that fare using either your credit card or PayPal, watch the cab approaching on the same cellphone, know its registration number and save around 50% of what the traditional cabs are charging you.
To a traditional cab, Uber is potentially as disruptive as the invention of the petrol engine to the buggy trade. In a short space of time, it will kill the old way of doing things stone dead. Business school academics call this disruption and Uber is very disruptive.
But for you and me, the consumer, it is also cheaper, more secure, and far easier to use. Just like the petrol engine. I use Uber when I visit Johannesburg on business and it works brilliantly. It also threatens to disrupt car hire companies for the same reasons.
But, just like the carriage trade at the end of the 1800s, the modern taxi driver thinks that he or she has a right to remain in business at our expense. What they’re saying is “I’ve invested all this money in a new factory to make spiffy new four-seater buggies – so the authorities owe it to me to ban the petrol engine.”
By the same token, the rampaging taxi drivers in Durban looted shops because – somehow – they believe Durban owes them recompense for introducing a new, rapid-transit bus state. That’s poppycock, too – neither Durban, nor any other South African city, owes any industry anything if a new technology suddenly renders it obsolete.
Stop for a moment and think what our lives would be like if governments had banned the petrol engine to protect the horse-and-cart people? Or if they had banned aircraft to protect the motor car people?
Well, that’s what the taxi drivers both in Europe and here in South Africa want.
To which I shout as loudly as I can, “Go Uber, go!”