Italy, and a market made of rules

Going from Ticino to Italy means changing scale and changing problem. Here licensed passenger transport is a system with precise rules: council licences, authorisations that cannot be lent out, consortia and co-operatives holding a town’s drivers together.

The part I studied longest was not the competition, it was the politics. In a market where the rules are written town by town, whoever enforces them counts as much as whoever writes them, and a product that ignores them does not fail in the market: it fails in court.

The closing question was a single one. In the big cities the public service is missing when it is needed, and the international platforms filled that gap by going around the rules. Could it be filled from inside, by putting the tools in the hands of the people who already hold those licences?