No need of a taxi license, "car rental with Chauffeur" is legal, and has existed for ages. The only difference with a taxi is that you are supposed to book them

No need of a taxi license, "car rental with Chauffeur" is legal, and has existed for ages. The only difference with a taxi is that you are supposed to book them in advance, and you can't just hail them. (And their might be some other restrictions around airport or something..) But if you hire a chauffeur (with his car), he needs to have the proper insurance to cover him and its passenger. Uber drivers actually must and have subscribed to them. The issue with Uberpop is that most of its drivers don't have subscribed to that special insurance, and as a results are pushing the cost to everyone else. As a regular driver, I would be quite unhappy if there was like 50k+ plus Uberpop driving all day long full of passengers, and if they were paying the same amount of money than an occasional driver, while being much more likely to have costly crashes. Hence the reason to require that UberPop drivers have a proper transportation insurance in the first place. Aside of any fairness, or legacy medallion system consideration, it is just a bad idea economically to have everyone paying higher insurance costs so that UberPop can reap all the benefits...