Long live taxi monopoly!

Or not.

Today the Finnish Government decided to increase taxi rates by 4% as of July 1st. Fairly high increase with zero warning time tells me about excellent lobbying by the monopoly industry. The news info says the increase is in line with the cost increase. I don’t doubt that at all – question is always about what you want to show in a report…

I have written about this earlier and I gotta say I am still unhappy with both the service as well as the tariffs. Part of the issue is that most taxi lisence owners change their cars every 3 years – and provide the service with fairly expensive cars.

Earlier almost all cars were Mercedes, but in the past years many have decided to increase their profits and drive cheaper ones. We still pay the same.

Some time ago the driver was from Iran – very friendly man. Some weeks later the driver was from deep Africa, from Gabon if I recall right. His car was a Huyndai that had seem some ass. Plenty of it. It had over 300.000 km in the meter, but that didn’t matter since the driver again had realized he was in a service inductry.

He was studying economics at the Helsinki University and finances the studies by driving the evening and night shifts. He plans to go to North Africa, most likely to Algeria to make a market analysis – having as a target to set up a mobile phone dealership with his friends. I wish all the best for him!

I’m not sure what would be the right solution, but I can claim today we don’t have the best one. Unless you are a taxi license owner. Still, this is considered as part of a transportation solution, controlled by the government so it should be possible to make changes. But please go to Sweden to check how they have done it – and learn from the mistakes.

Few words still about football - or soccer;

Hats off to England and Team USA in the football Worldcup. Both of them had to win to continue and they did it. Team USA lost today their second game winning goal in 3 matches due to a bad call by the referee. It would have been injustice if they would have been out from the games after these...

We have seen some flops in the games – perhaps France as the worst for now. Let’s see how Germany plays in a similar situation tonight.