“The FAS will not get anything good out of trying to put pressure on Yandex.Taxi”

An ordinary professor at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, scientific director of the Institute of Transport Economics and Transport Policy told Kommersant about approaches to regulating taxi aggregators, the elasticity of this business and assessing competition in the market. Mikhail Blinkin.

— How important a role do taxis, in your opinion, play in the urban transport system?

— Of course, the share of traffic in the same metro is much higher, but recently the use of taxis has increased. Taxi has become one of the main attributes of urban Moscow life.

— Is taxi development in Russia worse or better than in Europe?

— In Moscow, taxis are absolutely at the European level. Where they don’t interfere, everything is fine, but where they interfere, problems arise. Everyone always wants to intervene in the market. For example, in France, the socialists in power tried to influence the work of taxis, this only led to strikes by drivers. And our FAS clearly won’t get anything good out of its attempts to exert antimonopoly pressure on Yandex.Taxi.

– Why?

— Aggregators have such a thing as a tariff. It determines how many drivers are ready to respond to a call. If the cost of orders is underestimated, then the demand for taxis may increase, but the drivers themselves will not want to work for such an amount, and if they are overestimated, then passengers will no longer want to use a taxi, and traffic will fall. This is absolutely not necessary for the aggregator, so a balance must be maintained. Trying to regulate all this will be counterproductive.

— Is having an aggregator with a very significant market share a problem?

– Let’s imagine that there is a monopolist who holds 100% of the market. Of course, seeing that there are no alternatives, he can raise the prices for his service. Of course, in this case, the FAS should come to the monopolist and knock on the head.

But the fact is that a taxi is an elastic thing, it doesn’t work here. The aggregator cannot suddenly increase the price. There is competition here for both the passenger and the driver. In the taxi market, even if one aggregator holds a large share of this market, it can be called a monopoly purely formally.

— What do you think is responsible for the recent noticeable increase in tariffs?

“There are objective reasons for this, such as rising gasoline prices, inflation, rising prices for cars, the cost of servicing them, and the cessation of supplies of many components. The cost, of course, is affected by the shortage and rapid obsolescence of the vehicle fleet. Popular brands of German or Japanese cars began to be supplied to Russia less or stopped being imported altogether. Instead, the Chinese auto industry came to us, but people are still skeptical about it.

— Should the authorities take special measures to enter the market for players who could compete with Yandex.Taxi?

— Usually in a large city there are one or two aggregators, sometimes three. To create something similar to the level of major global companies such as Gett, Curb, Lyft, Wingz, Uber and Yandex.Taxi is not impossible. Another thing is that this will not change anything radically and will not greatly affect tariffs.

Let’s say a new aggregator appears that will reduce the price of transportation by half. What kind of driver will go to work there? The main thing is that the authorities do not interfere in regulating the market. There is still a misunderstanding between Yandex and the FAS. They just need to create a platform for discussion so that they can come to a consensus.

Interview conducted by Vladimir Komarov