As violent taxi protest besieges Jakarta, Uber wants to be the savior

Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta, is at standstill in places as a huge protest by taxi drivers fills roads. It’s the latest strike by public transport workers in the city of 9.6 million people as they call for authorities to ban apps like Uber and Grab, which they claim are causing taxi and bus drivers to lose income.

Today’s protest turned ugly in places, with taxi drivers seen turning on fellow cabbies who had not joined the strike.

Another Indonesia wtf moment: Jakarta taxi drivers protesting against Uber, Grab target non-striking colleagues. pic.twitter.com/RHZffipDkE

— Bryce Green (@brycewg) March 22, 2016

In another incident captured on video, a taxi driver steered his car into protestors standing at the roadside after being stopped in an attempt to get him to join the demonstration, hitting several of the men, and deliberately crushing one individual between the car and the intermediate barrier (see GIF below). It’s not clear if there were any injuries.

Uber’s avoiding the bad PR that often comes with surge pricing.

There have also been reports of threats against private car drivers running for Uber or Grab.

This kind of situation would usually trigger surge pricing on Uber, but the company has decided not to do that. Surge pricing was seen in the app in Jakarta early in the morning, but Uber announced on its Jakarta Twitter account at 10:17 am local time that surge pricing was cancelled. The US-based startup is perhaps keen to avoid the bad PR that often comes with surge pricing – and it senses an opportunity to save the day as taxis become nearly impossible to find.

Not only is Uber keeping its normal pricing for riders, the company is paying drivers a fixed US$3.80 per hour to stay out on the roads, reports local paper Kompas.

Surge pricing is Uber’s usual method to entice drivers to continue working in difficult conditions.

According to messages posted to Twitter, the messy and sporadically violent protest is turning people away from cabs and towards apps like Uber, Grab, and homegrown startup Go-Jek.

This tweeter calls the scenes on Jakarta’s inner-city toll road “anarchy.”