Budapest’s traffic gets affected by taxi drivers’ demonstration

NOL.hu reports that taxi drivers are preparing for a demonstration on Tuesday, April 26. About 1000 drivers are said to participate in the event, which will surely slow down the traffic of the downtown. They aim to trigger something that would stand up against Uber and other illegal transport applications.

The article refers to Népszabadság, who found out that taxi drivers plan to start a demonstration at about 8 o’clock on Tuesday morning, April 26 at Hősök tere. Then they would drive to Széchenyi tér to demonstrate in front of the building of the Home Office. According to the site, the protest would go on until 2-3 pm.

Furthermore, they talked to Géza Gottlieb, one of the organizers of the demonstration of January, who mentioned that the demonstrators do not intend to affect the traffic of Budapest as aggressively as they did earlier. However, this time the action might be more influential because now the representatives of the labour organizations and other transport organizations came to an agreement. Importantly, even though none of the big companies encourage the attendance of the demonstration, no drivers are banned from it either. Thus, it is hoped that at least 1000 cars will be seen demonstrating.

The whole point of the action is to protest against all of the companies in the country that “break the laws” regarding transportation. Not only against Uber, but against every other company of the grey or black market. Though, it was promised in January by government representatives that there will be a change on the market but actually nothing significant had happened yet. There are a few exceptions, when the license plates were taken off, but apart from them drivers of Uber and others are still on the streets.

NOL asked Gottlieb what comes next, in case of their action on April 26 having no success, but he refused to think about it negatively, for he believed in their success. Although, eventually, he said that, if the drivers could not achieve their goals this Tuesday then they are going to hold a demonstration every Tuesday later.

Copy editor: bm

Source: nol.hu