Home » Uber and taxi, peace in New York: “Everyone on the App”

Uber and taxi, peace in New York: “Everyone on the App”

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Uber and taxi, peace in New York: “Everyone on the App”

Once there was no more New York gesture than the raised arm to stop the trail of yellow cabs dominating the streets. Then, with the advent of Uber in 2014 – which for dominance led a tough battle against local taxi drivers, won by describing rivals as mafia, corrupt, inefficient, greedy and deploying its own army of 85,000 drivers – more and more inhabitants of the city who never sleeps had succumbed to the convenience of the application. Recognizable at the corner of every street for that curved posture on the mobile phone to follow the icon of the coveted passage. The most evident result was immediately a 7% increase in traffic in the city and the collapse of the value of a taxi license: from one million dollars to 150 thousand.

Now a new alliance will unify those two business models once defined by former Mayor Mike Bloomberg as “as different as water and oil”. Uber has announced a partnership with rivals of the past, which passes through a collaboration with Curb and Cmt, the apps used here by the yellow cars but never really took off. By the end of spring – the date has not been announced – it will therefore be possible to get an UberX or a “Yellow Cab” at the same cost: and with a single click.

As it already happens in other cities of the world. When Barcelona determined that in order not to compete unfairly, Uber drivers had to wait 15 minutes before being able to take a ride, the low-cost transport giant integrated 2,500 local taxis into its system. The same in Vienna where business was endangered by a law that required licensing for all. While in Hong Kong, Seoul, Bogotà, where the rides cost nothing, the low-cost transport giant has instead acquired entire taxi companies, in London, Paris and Rome the tensions with the cooperatives have never subsided: the rivalry remains high and only in Turin and Naples can taxi drivers join Uber on a voluntary basis. Nonetheless, managers’ ambitions are sky-high: “By 2025 we want all the taxis in the world on our platform,” Vice President Andrew Macdonald said at the annual investor meeting.

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The New York announcement, the first of its kind in the United States that immediately earned a 5 percent share, comes at a particularly critical time in the Big Apple’s transportation market, one of the most lucrative in the world. During the pandemic, when everyone was housebound, racing collapsed like everywhere else in the world. But many drivers, forced to change jobs, never returned: with the result that today at least seven thousand yellow taxis are parked in the garage.

Uber, which also lost 5,000 employees, still has 80,000 drivers. But demand vastly exceeds supply: and prices have soared more than in any other city in America, up by 17 percent compared to January 2020. The hope is that the alliance will save the yellow taxis: at the same time calming the prices. How much the novelty will suit passengers and taxi drivers is an unknown factor. The cost of a ride will be higher than that of a car stopped on the street: Uber, Curb and Cmt will in fact get a share. And the predetermined cost may not suit the driver.

For this reason, one of the agreements is to ensure return journeys in the case of journeys outside the city, routes that have become particularly painful with the increase in the cost of gasoline. Uber, on the other hand, is already singing victory: the increase in rides increases related offers, such as home delivery of food. Service that just cannot be obtained with an arm raised.

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