ROME, Nov. 29 — If the question ever arises again, Romans now know how long it takes to paralyze the entire city center: 20 minutes.
Taxi drivers protesting plans for additional licenses clogged Piazza Venezia Thursday, paralyzing the Italian capital.
That is all it took for Rome’s taxi drivers to execute a coordinated attack on commuters on Wednesday, when they flooded the all-important Piazza Venezia with their cars, idled them and clotted all of Rome’s main roadways. The disruption resumed Thursday, at a somewhat less severe level, and is likely to tie up traffic again on Friday.
The jam, a response to faltering negotiations with the mayor over fares and licenses, began as the lunch hour was ending and caused a gridlock that lasted into the evening.
The taxi drivers appear to be perfecting their skills just before a national strike of trains and buses, planned for Friday.
“It was easier yesterday because it happened when one shift was ending and another was just starting,” said Mauro Mangoni, a driver, as he stood in a light drizzle in Piazza Venezia, next to a line of cabs going nowhere. “We got calls on our Radio Taxi system and spoke to each other over cellphone at around 2:10. We were here by 2:30.”
The trigger for the latest strike was a proposal by Rome’s mayor, Walter Veltroni, to confront one of the irritants of city life here.
Among major European cities, Rome has long ranked near the bottom when it comes to taxis. According to a report by Banca d’Italia, the problem has been availability. Rome has 21 taxis for every 10,000 inhabitants — far below other major European cities — and that translates into extremely long waits or, occasionally, long walks.
On Wednesday, Mr. Veltroni, responding to a request by the drivers for what they believed to be a long overdue increase in fares, made a proposal: the drivers would get their 18 percent fare increase and the city would issue 500 more licenses.
Mr. Mangoni summed up the response of the drivers’ brigade: “It is blackmail.”
The drivers’ anger has been building. The city has managed to increase the number of taxi licenses substantially, to 7,000 now from 5,200 two years ago, and drivers complain that the value of their licenses has plunged by as much as 40 percent.
For Italians hungry for change, it was another example of the fierce resistance to an 18-month battle by the national government of Prime Minister Romano Prodi to liberalize markets. But many residents were irate at the labor protest.
“This time, we can’t let them win,” read one letter on a full page of comments in the newspaper Il Messaggero. “It is time to change the rules and that the citizens get respect.”
But one pedestrian, Valter Di Sisto, 32, a nurse, said, “Unfortunately, in Italy, sometimes this is the only way to be heard.”
