Editorial roundup

Nov. 25

(London) Evening Standard

Uber’s operating license

Remember Christmas parties before Uber? The squalid and unsafe scramble for minicabs home. The cost of late-night taxis.

Well, this year you can add to that the misery of a month-long rail strike on trains out of Waterloo which means some routes will stop running by 10 p.m.

News (Monday) that Transport for London has decided to withdraw Uber’s operating licence will shock a generation of Londoners who can barely recall what life in the city was like before you could summon a car with a click on a screen.

It will stun Uber’s 45,000 drivers, too. What’s going on?

The answer is that TfL is playing tough. It’s decided (Monday) morning that Uber is not a fit and proper company to hold an operating licence.

It has found that its app isn’t secure and that Uber’s systems have allowed unauthorised drivers to upload their photos to accounts that were not theirs, which means, it says, that on at least 14,000 trips people were not insured and the driver was not the one people they thought they had booked. …

Ubers aren’t about to vanish from the streets. It has been here before and survived: and Uber says that it has “fundamentally changed our business over the last two years and are setting the standard on safety”.

TfL concedes that’s true: its action, it argues, is a very clear shot across the bows rather than a fatal aim intended to take out the service for good.

Let’s hope that’s right. London needs to be a city that welcomes innovation and new technology, not one that drives it away.

Yes, Uber needs competitors — and TfL says it has authorised them. And yes, Uber needs to protect its passengers.

If safety can be guaranteed, London needs this service to stay on the road.