December 14, 2017
The opposition SDS party presented their draft of changes to the road transport act in the National Assembly’s regular session yesterday. Only one other opposition parliamentary group was in support of the draft in addition to the promoting SDS, which was the NSi, while all other parliamentary groups rejected the bill even going forward to parliamentary discussions.
The draft was deemed unsuitable by the Ministry of Infrastructure. State Secretary at the Ministry, Klemen Potisek, said that the bill would fail at providing equal access to the labour market in the field of administrating public passenger transport, and would not allow efficient supervision. Furthermore, the SDS draft does not solve the general problem of being able to hire a vehicle with a driver, and allows for the possibility of transportation based on the so-called Uberpop App, meaning that the services can be performed by anyone. This possibility has been rejected as inappropriate by the majority of the EU countries.
The US Company aimed to bring two of its services to the Slovenian market in 2016. In addition to its most common service to Europe, UberX, it wanted to pick up on Ljubljana’s status as the 2016 European Green Capital by introducing Uber Ljubljana, the first in the world to offer rides in electric cars.
What followed was a series of two-way legal accommodations, which on the side of the government remains at the level of a promise, that legal changes can be expected by the end of this year. However, the draft of the new law has not yet been presented by the government, because “in the process of preparing legal grounds for public transport operators it has turned out that drafting grounds for granting concessions will be much more demanding than we initially anticipated,” explained Mojca Kuhar, the spokesperson for the Ministry of Infrastructure, when speaking to Delo newspaper in August.
