[southpawgirl]

In some Italian cities the situation is no different: taxi licenses are issued only on a fixed, limited number and are sometimes inherited from father to child, often sold for mind-boggling amounts (comparable to the price of a house). The service as a result is quite crap: long waits, high prices per km and all the most contrived surcharges you can think of (5 additional Euros for the airport and some tourist destinations, etc). Each time a deregulation is proposed (and it does happen) there are immense backlashes from a small category that would be not only stripped of a privilege, but actually, properly ruined: some cabbies have to take 10 yrs mortgages to buy a license. It's a legacy state of affairs that carries on only because it's difficult to remove, not because it's of actual advantage to anyone.

[gioele]

> high prices per km

In Italy, and in other European countries, the taxi prices are set by the city councils, not the taxi drivers.

[officemonkey]

And those councils are aggressively lobbied (and possibly bribed) by those taxi drivers.

The most depressing thing about public corruption is how cheap it is.

[mikeash]

The same basic situation exists in New York City. They're called taxi medallions there, and the small supply and large demand causes them to cost a surprisingly large amount of money. The government even has a convenient graph of the average price over time:

http://www.nyc.gov/html/tlc/downloads/pdf/price_trends_chart...

That shows a cost of 359,000 in 2006. More recent data is even crazier:

http://www.nyc.gov/html/tlc/downloads/pdf/avg_med_price_2013...

According to that, they cost a million dollars apiece these days.