Uber means it’s a black day for London cabbies
London Cabbies are not renowned for their cheerful disposition and now they feel they are having a bumpy ride and are threatening to bring the capital to a standstill.
It may be best to avoid London next Wednesday, June 11.
The black cab drivers are planning a co-ordinated go slow around the streets in order to cause gridlock.
They are protesting about Uber, a rival service ran be a San Francisco company that is revolutionising taxi travel in over 60 cities across the globe.
Uber allows passengers to hail a cab using an App, with an online map that shows nearby available vehicles, indicates how long the cab will take to get to the pick-up point and tracks its progress.
Uber uses online mapping of the actual journey to calculate the fare, charging it to the credit card associated with the passenger’s account. The passenger is then invited to rate the driver and their cab, Tripadvisor style, to incentivise service quality. All of this is too much for the traditional cab drivers.
They complain that whilst they have taken them years to ‘do The Knowledge’ and learn their way around the streets, Uber drivers just pitch up with a satnav.
They also believe that because Uber calculates fares by tracking the cab, this is electronic equivalent of a taximeter, and only licenced black cabs are allowed to use those by law.
As the wind of change accelerates, further App-based taxi services, such as Hailo, have emerged to give the old style taxi more competition.
To modernise calling a cab has got to be good for the punter.
The drivers, though, have their feet on the brakes.
