Legal implications of novel taxi assignment strategies

Abstract

In the last years, many novel applications have appeared that promote the provision of services or activities in a collaborative way. Examples of such proposals are collaborative transportation services (uber, glovo, amazon flex, etc.), crowdsourcing, exchange help services among citizens, and others. The intrinsic idea behind such systems is to take advantage of existing “capacities” for providing new services or incrementing the efficiency of daily tasks of people at a low cost. Also, many researchers have focused and are analysing novel ideas and approaches in this direction. The concept of Smart Cities is a clear representation of this hype and provides a playground for novel approaches where the aim is to provide a high level of services to citizens in an optimized and thus, more efficient way. As a result of this research effort, many proposals have been and are suggested that could be deployed in the real world. However, such proposals also bring up multiple non-technical issues that need to be tackled before they can be actually implemented in practice. In this sense, in this paper we analyse legal implications of a proposal for collaborative service provision. In particular, we analyse the legal issues related to a recent work on taxi assignments with compensation from the standpoint of the Spanish legislation. From this exercise, we extract a set of topics and requirements, which need to be addressed so as to pave the way for the potential real-world deployment of such a system in a future.