Legal (Non)Compliance Of Taxi Transport In The Republic Of Croatia With Modern International And European Solutions

In order for transport to function adequately, existing legislation needs to be harmonised and adapted. The Road Transport Act of the Republic of Croatia, with its 2018 amendments, introduced important innovations in the regulation of contracts for transport in domestic road transport, which leads to significant difficulties in the conduct of modern public passenger transport. It was expected that the amendments to this Act would finally and adequately solve the problems related to road transport contracts, which both theory and practice have been warning about for many years. However, again an appropriate solution was not put forward, so Croatian regulation led to noncompliance with international treaties and modern European solutions. Taxi transport as a part of public transport is therefore not adequately regulated. The aim of the amendments to the Road Transport Act was to liberalise the taxi market and facilitate the use of this service, but there were also some negative consequences. In our opinion, the amendments to the provisions on road transport contracts have brought legal uncertainty and made it more difficult to exercise the rights under the transport contract. The paper analyses the changes in Croatian regulations, compares them with the provisions of international conventions and presents the case law of the European Court related to changes to the regulations of passenger transport by taxi. Solutions to the problem of legal regulation of road transport contracts in the Republic of Croatia are proposed at the end of the paper.