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Comment by nicolasp | Hacker News Reader

When someone comes to you to offer you a "taxi" service in France, it's pretty certainly a scam (especially with a price like that). A licensed taxi has a sign on the roof, doesn't randomly offer you its service, and its price is regulated. It never would have cost you even 60€ for 6 km. It would have been roughly the same as with the Uber, maybe a bit cheaper.

The question of whether you would prefer a licensed taxi or an Uber is a different one which I won't get into for now :)

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The problem is that I now have to know, for every country I visit, what their taxi regulation laws are and how they enforce them. With Uber, I know the brand, and I can just expect not to get scammed.

For international travelers it's the franchising aspect that is most appealing.

Uber operates in countries where their services are not in compliance with the local legislation (or operate in a gray area), and are operating until they get to a court case that will decide whether it is legal or not.

So if you don't know the local taxi regulation, your Uber might get pulled over by the cops who take the driver and you're left in the middle of nowhere. This has happened in Helsinki, for example (where the local taxi service is very reliable, albeit somewhat expensive and may be busy at certain hours).

In general, when visiting a country, you are expected to roughly know what the local legislation is.

So getting pulled over for using a trusted brand with a reputation at stake instead of the local tourist-preying cabs is supposed to be proof of the value of taxi regulation?

There are no tourist predator cabs in Helsinki because the cops stop anyone suspected of running an illegal cab service, including Uber rides. Many of the horror stories of getting ripped off in this thread have indeed been pirate cabs with no regulation behind them.

There might be some reasonable middle ground but I'm quite happy paying for a reliable, regulated service despite it's flaws rather than a wild west situation.

But the problem is that you can be taken advantage if even with a regulated cab, and indeed people report that this is a typical experience.

Legal != no rip-off

And I know there is a regulated dispute resolution procedure. But so far Uber/Lyft seem to be a much better process for that too.

Just a simple advice: When someone comes to you to offer you a "taxi" service everywhere in the world, be careful, it might be a scam. (One time, I've been robbed of all of my money in Vietnam accepting an offer like that) The best thing to do is to go to a taxi terminal or stop a car with TAXI written on it.

A while back in at Nice airport I was trying to get a cab into town. The licensed taxis with taxi signs on them were quoting us about twice the metered fare to get in. I actually wandered over to tourist info and asked if the cabs were not supposed to work at the official fares and they just kind of shrugged as if to say what can we do. You can see why consumers would not be too keen on the situation.

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