Courtney Love caught up in Uber protests
Travellers going to and from the airport walked alongside roads with their bags or got caught in ambushes, like singer Courtney Love, who was rescued by two men on a motorcycle.
Love tweeted: “They’ve ambushed our car and are holding our driver hostage.
“They’re beating the cars with metal bats. This is France?? I’m safer in Baghdad.”
Taxi drivers claim Uber’s lowest cost service is taking their livelihood away.
Despite repeated rulings against the low-cost UberPop service, its drivers continue to use French roads and the American ride-hailing company is actively recruiting drivers and passengers alike. Uber claims to have a total of 400,000 customers a month in France. Riot police chased strikers from Paris’s ring road, where protesters torched tyres in the middle of the road and swarmed onto exit ramps at rush hour.
Love sent a number of tweets. She wrote: “Paid some guys on motorcycles to sneak us out, got chased by a mob of taxi drivers who threw rocks, passed two police and they did nothing.”
France’s top security official said he had ordered an immediate ban on Uber in the Paris region but called for an end to violence against the service’s drivers.
“We are calling for calm. We are in a state of law,” interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve said. “A state of law is not a state of violence.”
Uber’s more expensive livery service is still legal but a source of intense frustration for French taxi drivers, who pay tens of thousands of euro for the equivalent of medallions and who face customer complaints that they are being resistant to changes such as credit cards and geolocation.
Taxi drivers complain that services like Uber unfairly undercut them and in recent weeks nearly 100 Uber drivers have been attacked, sometimes while carrying customers. One irritated taxi passenger was left with a broken face and black eye after he praised Uber.
“There are people who are willing to do anything to stop any competition,” said Thomas Meister, a spokesman for Uber. “We are only the symptom of a badly organised market.”
The French government, meanwhile, said nearly 500 legal cases have been filed across the country involving complaints about UberPop, the lowest cost service. Several drivers have had their cars impounded.
