[Pyxl101]

Do you happen to know: do black car services in Italy normally have to buy taxi licenses?

I'm curious because black car services (such as limousines and black towncar services) generally do not need taxi licenses in the US. A taxi license is only needed for hailing rides on the street, not for picking someone up by prior reservation. The Uber service provides a variety of different kinds of cars, some which operate more like limos while others operate like taxis (they even have medallioned taxis in some cities).

Edit: Thanks! Interesting to know how standards and norms vary by country in this area. It will be fascinating to see how transport evolves over the next decade.

[jaclaz]

The service is called NCC (Noleggio Con Conducente or Rent With Driver), the cars (and drivers) are nonetheless "licensed", since you are probably familiar with the concept of medallion, here is how a NCC car medallion looks:

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noleggio_con_conducente

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/76/No...

The differences are several ones:

a Taxi has a meter and follows some time + km official tariff (+ a number of "fixed" supplements in some cases, like going to the airport, etc.) a NCC works by private agreement (usually, taken in writing or verbally) in advance.

a Taxi is a public service, i.e. they cannot refuse the service (unless of course there are serious reasons), whilst the NCC is a private one.

a taxi can be (though rarely it is as since the dawn of time, years before Uber came out, most cities have "RadioTaxi" where you phone a number and they send you the nearest available taxi which is contacted via radio) hailed on the street, the NCC must (in theory) start each and every trip from their (private) garage and end it again at the garage on return, i.e. unlike the taxi in which it is "yours" just for the time you are onboard, the NCC is rented for the whole trip and cannot take other passengers on the way back.

moreover there are territorial limitations (different for each category) on the operations of both taxies and NCC, as an example a taxi licensed by city "A" can bring a customer to city "B" but cannot take another passenger in city "B", a NCC licensed by city "A" must initiate the trip (i.e. pick up the passenger) within city "A".

Overall, the situation is messy and overcomplicated and the (IMHO illegal) costs for the licenses (and their clearly too limited number) do represent problems, but Uber it is (still IMHO) not the solution to them.

[register]

Yes but the value of the license of a black car service is much lower than the one of a normal taxi. Also black car services must wait in their depot and pick up passengers only by appointment. Picking up passengers in the street is reserved only to taxies.

[notlambda]

According to my taxi driver you do