TPE in taxis: an opportunity for our profession!

Since January 1, 2015, the law now requires all taxi drivers to “have a visible and fully functional electronic payment terminal (EPT) in their professional vehicle, available to customers.”

This “new” provision, for which enforcement officers initially showed tolerance towards professionals who were not yet equipped (the transition period has now ended), is one of many regulatory changes that came into effect with the law of October 1, 2014, known as the TAXIS/VTC Law VTC Law, which has since been confirmed and clarified in the decree of December 30, 2014, implementing the said law.

This decree specifies in particular that “failure to possess an EPT is punishable by a fine of €68 for a first offense, but €450 in the event of a repeat offense”.

This additional obligation may, of course, be perceived as a penalty by some taxi operators due to the additional cost of purchasing and subscribing to the device, which will be added to their operating expenses, especially since the payment terminal will be of little or no use to some of them. In rural areas, the activity of professionals is almost exclusively monopolized by regular trips for “institutional financiers” such as local authorities with school transport or health insurance companies with seated patient transport.

Nevertheless, I believe that this is, on the contrary, an incredible opportunity for our professional community to dust off its image and restore its reputation among the general public, which, whatever we may think, remains the historical and still current target of the “private public passenger transport” market, which a number of us, remaining deaf to the changing expectations of customers, were wrong to consider a captive target.

In this respect, the rapid growth of the private hire vehicle fleet in recent years, particularly in large urban centers, clearly illustrates the still widespread existence of an “archaic” view of the concept of service and our duties towards our customers.

By almost systematically refusing any form of payment other than cash (which is, incidentally, completely illegal) for immediate collection fares, many taxi drivers in the capital and other large French cities have created fertile ground for the emergence of new competition, which is sometimes unfair or anarchic because it was initially insufficiently regulated. The result: a partial or occasional loss of customers to these new players in urban mobility, followed more recently by the decision of the public authorities to legally compel us, as artisans/traders, to improve the overall quality of our services.

Let’s hope that enough of us see this institutional “kick in the pants” as an additional means of ensuring the long-term viability of our businesses by giving meaning and a future to the mission of public service that was at the origin of our profession’s emergence, a long time ago!