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Friday, March 29, 2024

Taxis Are Making a Cautious Comeback

After years of losing market share to Uber and Lift, the good old yellow cab may be making a comeback. But will that be enough?

Once upon a time, yellow-painted vehicles roamed en masse in cities across the country, ready to take people wherever they wanted to go. To get on one, people just raised a hand when they saw one, or they called the company they wanted to travel with.

After the trip, you can pay for a taxi only in cash. That is, if you could get into one like that. Some drivers would refuse fares, especially to remote places, because The amount it will cost in gas, maintenance and time, for example, will be far too much compared to what they can earn, Despite the tip.

Then the smartphone was invented, and Uber got into a fight. The trips, which were heavily subsidized by venture capital, were cheap, and it was possible to pay by credit card. It was not difficult to find a driver; Uber and Lift recruited them heavily, thinking how much they could earn. Their background checks were much easier than taxi drivers went through. Lift and Uber had no limit on how many drivers they could recruit compared to taxi companies, and they also pay lower fees compared to them.

But lately, taxi passengers are slowly returning to cities like San Francisco, New York, Chicago and Minneapolis. Why? Many Uber and Lyft drivers left the business during the plague, which led to longer waiting times and rising prices. Some drivers and app manufacturers think this is the moment for taxi drivers to take advantage.

In 2017, Curb Mobility launched an app that works a lot like Uber or Lyft, but orders a licensed taxi instead.

Curb was founded by merging companies that provided tariff calculation and taxi payment solutions. The essence of creating an app for taxi companies was to help them compete in travel sharing. “With the advent of travel sharing companies, taxis actually needed someone to help provide them with a competitive app-based platform,” says Jason Gross, Curb vice president. “Demand is no longer the exclusive province of taxis taking people from point A to point B in the city, and they need to be more technologically advanced.”

And people respond. Curb, which is headquartered in New York, has experienced a 300% increase in people using its app to carry taxis between 2018 and 2021 in New York alone, even though the company will not provide hard numbers.

Barry Trento has been driving a cab in San Francisco for 21 years. The taxi company he drives, National, is collaborating with Flywheel, another taxi app that has started handling mobile travel payments for taxi rides. “We have seen a huge increase in the use of the flywheel app from those who refuse to pay the exorbitant prices. [of Uber or Lyft], “Says Trento, who adds one claim he has is the amount of money a flywheel takes from drivers. A flywheel, which could not be obtained for comment, also cooperated with the city’s oldest taxi company, Desoto Cab, in a joint branding arrangement, Renamed Flywheel Taxi to increase its users. A flywheel may also help centralize how taxis are sent in San Francisco, meaning people who use the app are more likely to be connected to travel.

The number of taxi passengers in San Francisco has also been erased by travel sharing, though according to data obtained from the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, the number of taxi passengers in 2021 is higher, with 1,828,370 trips, compared to 1,678,567 in 2020. Still, it is meager in comparison To 41 million. Both Uber and Lyft passengers delivered in San Francisco in 2020, according to data obtained from the California Public Committee.

What may also help the taxi industry in the city to survive may allow people with disabilities in discounted travel mobility. With the onset of the plague, San Francisco Moni has mimicked much of its transportation system, leaving 17 lanes running. To ensure that those who could not walk to the nearest transport route could continue to commute, the agency developed a so-called “essential travel card”, which gives them discounted taxi rides. Since the program began in April 2020, 4,872 users have been registered as of December 2021.

A blue-and-white taxi, which serves the metro area of ​​the 7 Twin Cities districts and is centered in a suburb of St. Louis in Minneapolis, was also affected by the rise of Uber and Lift. But working with accounts, like partnering with schools and the Minnesota Human Services Department to move people to their medical appointments, kept them on their feet.

“So … the number of passengers did not go down, it moved to a place where we took a lot more business and left the cash business [call-ahead or walk-up rides] Be that as it may, “said Waled Sonbol, who is one of the owners of blue and white taxis, adding that forward-reading and walk-up trips make up no more than 15% of their daily journeys.” So we make about a million trips a year. But like I said, our business has changed a lot the way we work. “Although Blue and White uses an app called Riide to allow riders to time a taxi, it is difficult for Sonbol to determine how many people use it, as more than 9 out of 10 riders do use the app to request taxis. It’s used to pay for. Both the city of Minneapolis and the state of Minnesota do not collect passenger data from taxi companies or travel companies.

Even where app-based taxi referral is on the rise, it may not be enough to save the taxi industry. In New York, where the use of the Curb skyrocketed during the plague, the number of taxi passengers dropped in total over the same period. While more than 121 million trips were traveled in 2018, taxis provided only 26 million trips in 2020. And while New York City has not released taxi passenger data for all of 2021, with 2.8 million trips as of the end of July, this indicates a downward trend. And while New York passengers appear to be declining, from 234.6 million trips in the last 11 months of 2019 to 143.2 million by 2020, the number of passengers in the first eight months of 2021 stands at 96.6 million, which may suggest a slight increase.

An app-based comment may help other cities. The number of passengers in taxis in Chicago was in free fall before the epidemic, dropping from 31 million trips in 2016 to 16.5 million in 2019. And while the plague has destroyed taxis – and commuters – the number of commuters has increased slightly, from 3.89 million in 2020 to 3.95 million in 2021, while the number of passengers continues to fall from 161.9 million in 2019 to 46.1 million in 2021. Although Curb operates in Chicago, it has not been able to provide numbers by press time.

But even when the number of passengers winks, taxi companies across the country may not have enough people to drive them. A number of drivers left when Uber and Lift reached the summit. “[We] We lost all our travels at night, as if, we became the place of New Year’s Eve [we had] Almost nothing, before we would bring in a temporary staff [to] Help get calls on New Year’s Eve, “Sonbol said.” I think the summit was probably in 2016, maybe in 2017, where it just became that our drivers did not even want to go out, it was not worth their time. “Minneapolis has 48 today. Licensed drivers throughout the city, compared to 1,359 ten years ago.

The plague caused more damage. Like their travel companions, most taxi drivers in San Francisco, Minneapolis, Chicago and New York are immigrants and live in multi-generational households. Drivers infected with Covid-19 can destroy these households. “So a lot of them left right when [the pandemic] Happened because they really do not want to get their mom or dad, [or] Children … sick, “said Sunbol, himself a descendant of immigrants from Egypt.

Kelly Desiant, a San Francisco-based writer who drove taxis and wrote about it in a series of columns for the San Francisco Examiner, has not driven a cab since the epidemic began, not just for health reasons, but because of driving costs. A taxi exceeds how much he can earn. “My spouse works from home and we have a five-year-old girl. I just do not think I can make enough money on a taxi ride right now to justify the expense of her entering a full-time kindergarten,” he tells Next City.

Many of those who continue to drive in San Francisco, Chicago and New York work to pay for their medallions, actually the permits needed to drive a cab. What used to be divided into a waiting list is now funded by drivers through thousands of dollars in loans.

And even with drivers available, taxi companies do not have enough vehicles to drive around. Minneapolis has only 43 licensed taxis, compared to 831 a decade ago. Taxi drivers, who own their own vehicles, buy older models and do not want to paint them. Sunball hopes to run a lobby in the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul to release the paint kit requirement for taxis. “If you do not even have to [a paint scheme] To [transportation network companies], Why do you need it for a taxi? You know, letters and numbers are more than enough, “Sonbol said.

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