BlaBlaCar Rides Now Fined Up to 150,000 Dinars in Serbia
Serbia's misdemeanor courts have issued the first rulings against drivers who offered paid rides through the BlaBlaCar app, with fines for illegal transport ranging from 50,000 to 150,000 dinars.
The fine for illegally operating transport through ride cost sharing apps in Serbia runs from 50,000 to 150,000 dinars, and domestic misdemeanor courts, according to information from judicial circles, have already handed down the first rulings on that basis against users of the BlaBlaCar platform.
The platform arrived in Serbia in 2015 as the successor to the regional app Autohop, the same year the Law on Passenger Transport in Road Traffic was adopted. The law has since been amended several times, most recently in 2020, but it has never explicitly recognized the phenomenon of ride sharing. As a result, according to legal experts, the same provisions that govern operating public transport without a license apply to users of the app.
What Does the Law Consider Illegal Transport?
The law does not set out the conditions under which ride sharing is legal. Instead, it lists the forms in which it becomes illegal. Any one of the following is enough: the service was paid for, scheduled line transport exists on the same route, more than five passengers are in the vehicle, the ride goes door to door, the trip was publicly advertised, or the driver is not able to cover the cost of the trip on their own. An additional condition for the misdemeanor is that the passengers are not family members and that they board and disembark at locations where a bus stop exists.
For attorney Marija Milojkovic, who works in this area and explained the legal basis to Biznis.rs, the provision itself is not precise enough.
The Law on Passenger Transport in Road Traffic contains the misdemeanor of “unlawful conduct of transport,” committed by a person without carrier status if they do it two or more times.
Milojkovic points out that, worded this way, the provision could be applied even to absurd cases, such as a tourist trip with friends that could just as easily have been made by public transport.
The fine itself is not issued on the spot. Authorized officials and inspectors typically stop vehicles whose rides were advertised through the app, but the further procedure runs through a request to open misdemeanor proceedings before the competent court. That shifts the burden of proof onto the party filing the request, meaning the inspector, who must prove before the court that the specific ride met the legal conditions to be declared illegal transport.
Who Loses to Unfair Competition
For registered carriers, who pay licenses and taxes, app users who charge close to commercial prices for rides represent unfair competition. Spanish bus operators previously made the same argument, suing the company that owns the BlaBlaCar platform and asking the court to urgently ban ride sharing on Spanish territory.
The Spanish court rejected that lawsuit, ruling that public and shared transport do not belong to the same category: while Uber, under that ruling, counts as public transport because its drivers make a profit on it, BlaBlaCar is exempt from those regulations because it does not constitute a commercial activity, but rather the sharing of costs the trip already involves. Milojkovic highlights that distinction as key for the Serbian context as well: by the very nature of the concept, BlaBlaCar is not supposed to generate profit for the driver, but to cover, through the fare, part of the cost of a trip the driver would have made anyway.
As a possible direction for a solution, Milojkovic points to the French model, where ride sharing is legally defined as the joint use of a vehicle by a driver and one or more passengers for a non-commercial trip that the driver was already making for their own purposes. No such definition exists yet in Serbia, but the competent ministry held a public consultation in August this year on the draft of a new law on passenger transport, which concluded in early September. Whether the new text will finally separate ride sharing from public transport remains unknown for now.
For now, only the financial part is clear: whoever is found responsible for illegally operating transport through a ride sharing app will pay a fine that can reach 150,000 dinars, regardless of how much they charged for the ride itself.
