“In general, I wait for 4 or 5 minutes and there… 12!
“, grumbles Vanessa, who is the crane foot in the rain, on the lookout for his VTC “which must arrive any minute to another”.
Like this notary from Strasbourg, other VTC users express their dissatisfaction on this rainy morning in front of the Gare de l'Est.
Monique, a stylist from Germany, says she sometimes had to wait between 30 minutes and an hour for her VTC driver to arrive during her stay in Paris.
Cynthia, 27, even missed her train because she was unable to quickly find a VTC to travel from her home in Neuilly-sur-Seine to the Paris train station.
“I had to cancel several times because no driver accepted my request… I lost between 20 and 30 minutes, and missed my train,” she laments.
In recent weeks, many users of VTC applications in Paris and Île-de-France have noticed longer waiting times and cancellations of races at the last minute.
“It's complicated to find a driver today,” admits Saïd (the first name has been changed), driving his VTC.
“Now the waiting times have doubled,” explains the forty-year-old.
"The problem with the applications is that sometimes we will do 1.5 km for 1 km of race with the customer...", recognizes Saïd, who has just passed his license exam, to no longer "work in the wind ".
"Today, drivers no longer accept any race," said Brahim Ben Ali, of the INV union (National Intersyndicale des VTC).
“There is a huge flow of small races, but the problem is that they are very poorly paid.
The drivers will practice the "switch" - that is to say juggle from one VTC application to another - in order to find the most profitable race, believes Brahim Ben Ali.
A practice which explains, according to him, the cancellation of races at the last minute.