Inside Italy: How bad are Italy's taxi shortages and will things ever improve?

Local Italy

29-03-2025

Inside Italy is our weekly look at some of the news, talking points and gossip from Italy that you might not have heard about. It's published each Saturday and members can receive it directly to their inbox, by going to their newsletter preferences or adding their email to the sign-up box in this article.
If there's one thing about Italy that international residents and frequent visitors to the country often complain about, it's taxis.
Long queues and interminable waiting times when trying to hail a ride are far from uncommon, especially in popular tourist destinations and major cities such as Rome, Milan and Naples.
The problem is anything but new. News reports of holidaymakers and residents having to wait well over an hour for a taxi ride have figured extensively in both national and international media in recent years.
In June 2023, Italy's newspaper of record Il Corriere della Sera described the state of taxi services in the country as 'chaos', citing 'extremely long queues at stations and airports' and 'endless waiting times on the phone'.
Nearly two years on, the situation seems to be largely the same.
There were tensions in Milan in late February after Milan Fashion Week operators warned that taxis were 'nowhere to be found'. More recently, critical taxi shortages have also been reported in Monza, Lombardy, and Bologna, Emilia Romagna.
Why are taxis so hard to find in Italy?
The situation is mostly attributable to local authorities not issuing new taxi licences for years or, at times, decades.
According to news site Wired, Naples, which currently has 2,364 taxis (around 25 for every 10,000 residents), hasn't issued new licences since 1997.
But the long-standing 'taxi drought' in the Campanian city pales in comparison to that seen in Genoa, Liguria, and Livorno, Tuscany, whose authorities haven't granted new licenze since 1980 and 1977 respectively.
As for Rome, the city hasn't issued new licences since 2004 (though 1,000 should be assigned at some point this year following a 'historic' public tender last year)
At present, there are 7,838 taxis in the capital – that's around 35 for every 10,000 residents.
For context, London has some 19,000 taxis (106 vehicles per 10,000 residents) while Paris has 18,500 (nearly 90 per 10,000 residents).
If at this point you're wondering why most Italian cities haven't issued new licences in years, especially considering how frequent complaints about queues and long waits are, the answer largely lies in the power of Italy's taxi driver associations.
The Italian taxi driver lobby – which is regarded as one of Europe's most powerful lobby groups – has long successfully opposed any change to the status quo, blocking local authorities' attempts to issue new licences and hindering central government efforts to open up the sector to competitors.
Over the years, drivers have staged mass protests and have even resorted to violence to demand stringent restrictions on private-hire vehicles (NCCs) and maintain their monopoly.
"When they mobilise, their ability to paralyse politics is evident," Matteo Hallisey, from the centrist +Europa party, told Euractiv.
refer to it as a 'mafia'.
So will things ever improve?
There were signs that things could potentially be starting to change in 2023, when Italy's competition watchdog opened an investigation into the taxi sector following the emergence of "critical issues" in Rome, Milan and Naples.
The watchdog said it had requested information on the number of active licences and pledged to "examine possible initiatives aimed at protecting consumers' amid reports of long waiting times.
But the investigation didn't result in the shakeup many had hoped for, with the competition body only issuing a series of non-legally-binding recommendations to raise the number of available taxi licences.
Both Rome and Milan have since decided to issue new licences. Milan started issuing the first of 450 new licences earlier this year, while Rome is set to grant 1,000 new licences by the end of the year.
However, the scale of the planned additions is often believed to be too small to bring about any significant changes.
According to Nicola Zaccheo, president of Italy's transport regulation authority ART, Rome's move to add 1,000 taxis will only scratch the surface, as the city would need 'over 2,000' additional cabs to solve its shortages.
Similarly, the 450 additional licenses planned for Milan are 'not enough' and people will continue facing 'enormous problems when looking for a taxi' in the coming months, according to Andrea Giuricin, a professor of Transport Economics at the University of Milan-Bicocca.
As a final point, Italy's current government is unlikely to back any major proposals to liberalise and deregulate the taxi sector.
Both Brothers of Italy and the League sided with taxi drivers when then-PM Mario Draghi unsuccessfully tried to open up the market to competitors in 2022.
Last year, League leader and Deputy PM Matteo Salvini signed off on a round of stringent new rules for NCC drivers, including the requirement to observe a 20-minute waiting period between rides.
Lazio's TAR Tribunal later suspended the enforcement of the new requirement after deeming it unlawful.