双语时事：从巴黎司机运动看出租车监管

　　They are taking to the streets in Paris. They have secured a ban in Brussels. They have gone to court in Berlin. Taxi drivers across Europe are united against Uber – a Silicon Valley start-up, backed by Google and Goldman Sachs, whose app-based car service is being rolled out internationally.

　　在巴黎，出租车司机走上了街头。在布鲁塞尔，他们成功迫使当局通过了一项禁令。在柏林，他们告上了法庭。全欧洲的出租车司机已经联合起来，反对基于移动应用的叫车服务提供商优步(Uber)。这家硅谷(Silicon Valley)初创公司得到了谷歌(Google)和高盛(Goldman Sachs)的注资，正在向全世界推广它的叫车服务。

　　The regulation of taxi services arouses emotions. My local French driver asked recently: “What do London cabbies do when they retire?” He explained that his colleagues rely on the onward sale of taxi licences to fund their pensions. In New York, the value of a taxi medallion now exceeds $1m. London, however, issues licences freely to anyone who passes “The Knowledge”, the demanding test of London’s geography required of drivers of the distinctive black cabs.

　　出租车服务的监管是个容易让人激动的话题。最近在法国搭出租车时，司机问我：“伦敦的出租车司机退休时会怎么做?”他解释说，他的同事的退休金，部分来自转售自己的出租车牌照所得。在纽约，如今一块出租车牌照的价值已超过100万美元。但在伦敦，任何通过“知识”(The Knowledge)考试的人都可免费获发出租车牌照。这是一项很难的考试，考试内容是出租车司机必须掌握的伦敦地理知识。伦敦的出租车别具特色，外观是黑色的。

　　Some regulation of taxis is necessary. The nature of the service they provide means that many of its users are vulnerable. They are disabled, or women who need a safe trip home late at night, or foreign tourists who have no idea what is a reasonable fare from the airport to the city. Beware Budapest, where taxis are unregulated, and Oslo, where even the metered fare will max out your credit card.

　　一定程度的出租车监管是必要的。出租车服务的性质决定了，它的很多乘客处于弱势地位，比如残疾人、在深夜需要安全归家的女性、或是不清楚从机场打车到城里的合理费用水平的外国游客。在布达佩斯要当心，那里的出租车是不受监管的;还有奥斯陆，在那里即便打表，打车费用也会刷爆你的信用卡。

　　Taxi licensing illustrates regulatory capture, the phenomenon by which regulation intended to serve the public is hijacked by industry interests. As every passenger knows, drivers are voluble, and enjoy a certain solidarity; their clients, however, are diffuse and diverse. In 1978 a protest by cab drivers brought central Dublin to a halt. The Irish government responded by agreeing to freeze the number of taxis on the streets of the city. Over the next two decades the Irish economy grew strongly and Dublin became notorious for taxi queues. There was even a serious proposal to erect taxi shelters across the city, so that waiting citizens could shelter from the Irish rain.

　　出租车牌照制反映出了“监管俘获”(regulatory capture) 现象，即原本旨在服务公众的监管却被行业利益所劫持。每一名出租车乘客都知道，出租车司机很健谈，并且在某种程度上团结在一起，而他们的客户却是分散化和多样化的。1978年，出租车司机举行的抗议导致都柏林市中心停摆。为应对这场抗议，爱尔兰政府答应冻结都柏林的运营出租车数量。过去20年，爱尔兰经济强劲增长，都柏林各处排队打车的景象也逐渐闻名于世。甚至有人严肃提议在都柏林各处设立出租车候车亭，让等待打车的市民有地方躲雨——爱尔兰的雨可是说下就下。

　　The regular Christmas chaos – taxis were unavailable at times of peak demand – became a political issue. But Prime Minister Bertie Ahern stood firm in defence of the status quo. It was left to the Irish courts to declare the restrictions on numbers unlawful. Within two years, the number of cab licences in Dublin had increased more than threefold.

　　每逢圣诞节就会出现的混乱场面(需求高峰时段根本打不到车)成了个政治问题。但当时的爱尔兰总理伯蒂•埃亨(Bertie Ahern)却坚决维护现状。最终是爱尔兰法院出面，宣布限制出租车牌照数量是违法的。随后不到两年，都柏林的出租车牌照数量就增加了两倍多。

　　So long as regulation ensures that vehicles are safe and drivers honest, it is difficult to see how the public interest could ever be served by restrictions on numbers. Britain’s Office of Fair Trading reached this conclusion in 2003 (although there are no such restrictions in London, many other local authorities impose limits). But the lobbyists prevailed; the parliamentary transport committee issued an extraordinary attack on the OFT report, and the government decided to do nothing. The Law Commission reiterated the OFT’s finding in 2012, but by the following year had modified its advice and suggested that there might be a case for restricting supply, although it gave little guidance as to what that case was.

　　只要监管确保车辆安全无虞、司机诚实可靠，就很难理解为何限制出租车数量会有利于公众利益。英国公平交易办公室(OFT)在2003年得出的结论也提出了同样的质疑。(尽管伦敦对出租车数量没有限制，但英国许多其他地方当局有这样的限制。)但游说势力占了上风;国会的交通委员会(transport committee)罕见地抨击了OFT的报告，政府决定不采取任何行动。法律委员会(Law Commission)在2012年得出了与OFT相同的结论，但在次年修改了自己的建议，提出限制供给或许是有道理的，尽管它没有明确说明这个道理是什么。

　　In Paris, cab numbers are tightly controlled and there are virtually no private hire vehicles. Taxis are mainly used by business people and journeys per head are less than a third of what they are in London or New York. Lower socioeconomic groups rarely use cabs in France – in London and New York they do, extensively – and there are large areas of Paris where a taxi service is in effect unavailable. That elitist outcome is strikingly similar to the experience of another regulated industry, civil aviation, where service was confined for many years to business travellers and the affluent, until deregulation and the internet made the emergence of low-cost airlines first possible and then inevitable. The parallels with the development of Uber are clear.

　　在巴黎，出租车数量受到严格控制，而且几乎不存在“约租车”(private hire vehicles)。出租车的主要客户是商务人士，人均乘坐里程不到伦敦或纽约的三分之一。在法国，中低收入阶层很少打车，不像在伦敦和纽约，那里的中低收入阶层经常打车;此外，巴黎还有大片区域事实上打不到车。这种“高端化”的结果与另一个受监管行业的经历惊人的相似，那就是民航业，后者在许多年里也曾仅为商务旅客和富裕阶层服务，直到去监管化和互联网使得廉价航空公司的兴起先是成为可能、而后变得不可阻挡。这显然为优步的发展提供了参照。

　　But the problem of the French driver’s pension remains. The American economist Gordon Tullock described “the transitional gains trap”: the policy of restricting numbers is foolish but cannot be abandoned without wiping out the hard-earned savings of drivers. One might have less sympathy for investors; most New York cabbies rent rather than own licences. In Dublin, the Irish government established a hardship fund to help compensate drivers who had been counting on the value of the licence to supplement their retirement income, or had recently taken out a loan to purchase a licence. Politicians should beware of policies that are easy to implement and costly to reverse.

　　但法国出租车司机的退休金问题依然存在。美国经济学家戈登•塔洛克(Gordon Tullock)描述了“暂时性收益陷阱”(transitional gains trap)：限制数量的政策是愚蠢的，但无法在不使司机辛苦攒下的积蓄化为乌有的前提下抛弃这一政策。人们对投资者或许就没这么多同情心了;纽约的出租车司机大多租用牌照，而不持有牌照。在都柏林，爱尔兰政府成立了一个扶困基金，为那些原本依靠牌照价值来补充退休收入、或刚为购买牌照而贷了一笔款的司机提供经济上的帮助。政界人士应提防那些容易执行、但要付出高昂成本才能撤销的政策。