Taxi chaos in the Italy of the tourist boom between empty calls and endless queues
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Long waiting times and, in the worst cases such as during peak hours, taxis that cannot be found. The dizzying growth of international tourism in the post-Covid period makes the shortage of white cars even more evident in metropolises such as Milan and Naples via Florence and Rome. Unnerving queues at the stations and squares most frequented by tourists, radio taxi switchboards that do not respond, city parking lots that are inexorably empty while the taxis in circulation are occupied.
There are around 4,900 licenses in Milan, just like in 2006. «Rome would need a thousand more taxis than those currently in circulation, in Milan another 650 and in the main cities with a strong tourist vocation, the service would need to be increased by at least 20% – exclaims Carlo Rienzi, president of Codacons, who has been asking for years to strengthen this public service -. It is a situation that has lasted for about twenty years because there is the inability of the municipal administrators to manage the matter, they don’t have the will to intervene because in all cities the taxi drivers are a powerful lobby».
The node of the new licenses
If in recent days there has been discussion of “Next generation mobility” and “flying cars” that will be tested during the 2026 Winter Olympics, Furio Truzzi, president of Assoutenti underlines that “in some cities the issue of new licenses has been stopped for decades”. According to insiders in Milan to have a service at the level of the big cities, serve another thousand white cars to which are added the approximately 6 thousand drivers Rental with driver of Lombardy.
Instead, the situation is deadlocked. It matters little that at night in a large city like Milan, one third of calls, according to data from the Municipality, remain unanswered. Then there are days when the Milanese taxi service collapses mercilessly. It is the evening of 9 May this year, it is raining, in addition to the tourists, two fairs, Tuttofood and Made In Steel, and a world medical congress are taking place in the city. Taxis are nowhere to be found in the city and chaos reigns around the Central Station with hundreds of people lined up waiting for the arrival of a white car. Because if the number of taxis in Milan has been stationary for years, the tourist flows have multiplied: in 2019, 11 million tourists were touched against 7.7 in 2016 and over 2.5 million arrived in the city in the first quarter of 2023 of visitors. In the last meeting of the Palazzo Marino Taxi Commission, the reopening of the notice for family collaborations at 16 hours was proposed and the revision and remodulation of the service shifts with the aim of a fair distribution of the offer in the new shifts, also in the most critical bands, especially in the evening and at night. As regards the responses from the taxi service, the unfulfilled ones increased from 6% in 2015 to 14% in 2018, with an average maximum peak of 28% between 7 and 9 pm on weekdays and 42% between midnight and four o’clock in the morning on weekends.
Supplementary rounds for events
In recent months, the situation seems to have even worsened. In the capital we have to go back to 2006, when the then mayor Walter Veltroni launched a tender to issue 2,000 new licenses. Today, to meet the growing demand and in view of the Jubilee 2025, rumors of a tender for the issue of another thousand taxi licenses are circulating among professionals in Rome. The conditional is a must, because the green light will be needed from the union representatives, who have always been against the increase in licenses. The Capitol focuses on supplementary shifts, i.e. for each taxi two drivers will be able to work with different shifts. A path taken by many administrations and there are those who resort to more radical choices. This is the case of the municipality of Florence, where on the occasion of the Pitti Uomo fashion shows, the event ended on Friday, the “free shift” was introduced with a municipal resolution. “In some periods of the year there are critical issues such as during Pitti and in the months of June and July in the high season”, explains Giovanni Bettarini, councilor for the budget. In Naples, a city that has experienced a tourist boom in recent years, Edoardo Cosenza, Councilor for Infrastructure and Mobility of the Municipality says: «In some time slots such as the evening there is a certain criticality, but we do not see the need for new licenses , while we should work on shifts and put order in the hubs of the Central Station and the port”.
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