Publisher's Synopsis
The art of the taxi driver in our family is a tradition that it is handed down from father to son. My father started working as a taxi driver in Milan in 1979 at the age of 21. Subsequently, I also started working as a taxi driver in Milan thirty years later, in 2009, always at the age of 21. In 2013, my brother also became a taxi driver in Milan.From 2009 to today, I can say that I have seen everything. In ten years, I have transported at least forty thousand people aboard my taxi. With each of them, I had a conversation, a discussion, or an argument. I have dealt with thousands of people and I can say that I have acquired enough knowledge on how to manage all types of people.In ten years, I have seen the world around me changing. When I started doing this job, I never thought that through an application on my mobile phone I could directly receive taxi requests from customers. In 2009, the first smartphones had just come out, but the only real news was the fact that the phone was a touch screen. The first touch screen smartphones performed the same functions as a phone with a keyboard. Subsequently, various applications were developed, including those for dispatching taxi rides.Precisely because of the development of technology in smartphones, applications such as UBER have managed to undermine the entire taxi sector globally. In some parts of the world, taxis have practically disappeared to make room for UBER drivers. In Italy, we fought hard to defend our work and, in the end, we received positive results. We have stopped all illegal practices put in place by UBER. In addition, we managed to compete with UBER thanks to the use of specific taxi applications such as "mytaxi", which has now become "FreeNow".Over the years, I have noticed that thanks to taxi apps for smartphones, the number of taxi users has increased exponentially. This is because anyone who has a smartphone can find a taxi that takes him to his destination wherever he is through a simple geolocation. People no longer need to know the phone number of the taxi company in the city where they are located. Furthermore, they no longer need to know where they are. The taxi application for smartphones finds the nearest taxi and sends to the taxi driver the passenger location.