Demand for non-scheduled passenger transport has not fallen. What changed is where it enters: where a phone call to a dispatch centre used to form, a request now forms inside an app.
The survey measuring that shift was run by Lab21 in January 2026, with more than 2,200 interviews, commissioned by a taxi drivers' union and by the apps of the Italian taxi cooperatives. As reported by ANSA: in Italy 69.1% of users still call a taxi by phone while apps stop at 25.6%, and in Europe the opposite happens, with more than half of bookings made through mobile apps.
It is worth reading precisely because of who paid for it. The study was commissioned by the people who defend the phone, and the European number goes against their interest.
One figure is deliberately left out here. The same study reports an Italian app-booking share, but the survey asks how people book a taxi, and in Italy Uber and Bolt operate with private-hire drivers. Someone using those apps does not answer "I book a taxi from an app", so the Italian number understates by construction. The European figure is aggregated and does not carry that distortion.
Why it matters more than it looks
A dispatch centre does not only lose the margin on that ride. It loses the relationship: the customer who moves to the app no longer learns the phone number, does not save it, does not pass it on to the office or the hotel where they work. A lost ride is a single event. A lost contact is recurring.
And it is a mechanism that feeds itself. Fewer calls means fewer drivers listening, fewer drivers means longer waits for whoever still calls, and longer waits push those people to the app as well.
Italy is not immune, it is behind
The comforting reading of these numbers is that the Italian market is different. The honest reading is that it is slower. The European countries surveyed have the same service, the same category rules and the same customers as ten years ago. What changed is not the transport. It is who holds the request.
What stays in the operator's hands
What stays is the one thing the platforms do not have: the direct relationship with local operators and ownership of the regulated service itself.
The problem is not demand. It is the channel through which demand is collected.
Original (Italian): In Europa più di una prenotazione su due passa da un'app
Disclosure: I build UrbanGo, dispatch software for licensed taxi and private-hire operators. Everything above is sourced; this paragraph is the part where I sell something.
