Its the cartel
I'm not a great fan of Uber as a business model but at the same time you have to be careful of established interests using spurious arguments to suppress a disruptive business model. There was a court ruling recently in California that sent a shot over the bows to professional licensing bodies, clearly delineating between a professional standards organization and a cartel -- too many of these standards organizations, ones who've been given the power to regulate trade in a particular field, were using their power to exclude competition. (...and they all cite 'safety' as the reason).
In this case the problem is that taxis should be using the Uber application. They can't because Uber takes rather a large slice of the revenue (50%?) which would make the business uneconomic. That's why Uber's business based around private cars and non-commercial drivers -- the PR front talks about 'sharing' but in reality people are working practically full time on this (the company's enabling them) and so they're really just yet more independent contractors on zero hours employment contracts. I can understand the taxi drivers being a bit annoyed about this -- anyone can compete with you if they don't have the overhead that your business needs to be in business legally -- but at the same time they need to understand and embrace the technology.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
