By Janet Burns
For almost a decade, ride-hail platforms
like Uber and Lyft have cornered a service consumers demand: the ability
to book rides through an app. In response, professional taxis have
increasingly turned to
similar platforms to help bring their industry and customer pool up to speed.
These include apps like MyTaxi, Cabify, and
Taxi.EU, plus dozens of worker-run platform cooperatives serving passengers around the nation and world.
Here in the ride-hail revolution's home country, one of the most popular taxi apps is
Curb,
designed to let users hail licensed cabs and Access-A-Rides, book
flat-rate or per-mile rides in advance, and pay for ongoing taxi rides.
Focused on major metropolitan areas for now, Curb has participating fleets in 65 US cities so far, accessible by Android and iOS,
and plans to expand. It's operated by Curb Mobility, which
provides payment and backseat entertainment services (previously as
Way2Ride) to fleets in New York City and nationwide.
Unlike Uber, Lyft, Via, Gett, and Juno, which connect users to those tech firms' pools of privately recruited and vetted drivers,
Curb works with cities' extant official services to link riders with
available taxis and Access-A-Rides in their area — something cab
companies (and Uber itself) could and probably should have done a decade
ago.
By phone, Curb's vice president of mobile Jason Gross said that the
ability to hail, pre-book, and pay for rides through an app is something
drivers and riders have requested for years.
For most individual fleets or cities, however, it's been a huge
struggle to launch and promote apps that can compete with transportation
network companies (TNCs) like Uber and Lyft, whose
explicit focus and expertise is technology, not human transport.
"The taxi industry began as a 'Wild
West' a century ago, and we're seeing [riders and drivers] go through
exactly the same problems again," Gross said. "Ironically, the fastest way to get a vehicle is many cases is still to walk outside."
While taxi dispatches and app orders account for some of professional
drivers' fares, Gross explained, the bulk come from being at the right
place at the right time.
The result is that drivers — whether in
radio-linked yellow cabs, or algorithm-and-GPS-led private vehicles
— will inevitably
try
to position themselves where they believe the best fares are likely to
be: places like airports, southern Manhattan, and other bustling zones.
Another result, Gross said, is that the important issue of denial of
service to different communities is often conflated with drivers'
efforts to position themselves for trip requests. "If there's a belief
that there are more trips with higher fares in Manhattan, drivers will
congregate in Manhattan," he said.
"It’s a little disingenuous to say that the Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC)
was not addressing underserved areas. And the idea that we're at over
100,000 professional drivers since the [TNC boom], and don't have enough
vehicles to serve five boroughs? That's not true either."
Getting drivers to where they're needed (and avoiding pile-ups where
they're not) is a tricky issue to solve, particularly without a
system-wide strategy and preferably real-time data on demand. For their
part, TNCs have left the decision of where to cruise around up to the
individual drivers.
New York's TLC, meanwhile, attempted to improve service outside of
Manhattan several years ago with the introduction of 'boro cabs,' or
green cabs, which are licensed to pick up street hails in those areas
where yellow cabs are seldom seen, and black cars have traditionally
filled in.
The TLC stopped issuing green cab medallions this year due to ongoing
competition from TNCs, but thousands of those vehicles are still on the
road, and ready to hail or book via Curb. "People wanted those
licenses, to do that work," Gross said.
Gross said that mounting financial pressures and street traffic
have highlighted how much NYC's yellow and green cab drivers, black car
drivers, and even TNC drivers have in common, from everyday struggles
to high personal stakes. "Going
back several years, taxis and black car companies saw themselves in a
fight to the death, but since the advent of ride-hails, we're seeing a
lot more cooperation."
For example, today's NYC's taxi and livery or 'black car' drivers both rely
on fares from the publicly subsidized
Access-A-Ride program in order to get by after years of competing with
TNCs like Uber, which subsidize their sub-market-rate rides with billions of dollars from investors.
According to Gross, Curb plans to extend its network to include more
livery fleets next year, while NYC pilot programs have sought to bring
Uber and Lyft drivers into this accessibility network for New Yorkers.
Just this week, Brooklyn borough president Eric Adams
hailed the pilot program as a way of helping close the transportation gap for NYC students with physical disabilities.
"It's the first time we've been part of the paratransit program,
which our API helps coordinate. We take a lot of pride in of the work
we're doing, connecting the disabled community and knowledgeable drivers
with clearly marked and often pre-equipped cars, who won't be forced
[into legal] arbitration if there's a medical issue."
"The program provides hundreds of thousands of trips each
month, and we take in their overflow, which is thousands of rides a
month," Gross said. "Numerous drivers have told me, 'I would have turned
in my license if not for the work provided through Access-A-Ride.'"
For riders accustomed to Uber and Lyft, Curb's pricing system might
come as a bit of a surprise: not including Curb's $2 booking fee, the
price of a ride may well be higher than TNCs' estimates during their
slow times, or well lower than TNCs during "surge pricing."
According to a
recent report on taxi and ride-hail services in the Raleigh, NC area, for example, taxi cabs
average
a flat $46.70 for trips from the city's downtown to Raleigh-Durham
International Airport; at 11 p.m. on a weekday, Uber and Lyft might
provide the trip for a little more than $20, but on a Saturday night, it
would cost between $50 and $60 (not including tip).
Prices for vehicles booked through Curb will most likely be higher
than Uber's more often than not, however. That's because taxi rates have
been calculated and set to cover the costs of labor, insurance, local
fees, safety measures, and even oversight for fleets.
Uber and Lyft's prices, on the other hand, have generally stayed
comfortably below what it actually costs for an adult person to pick up
and drive another person from Point A to Point B, all things
considered — seemingly a key part of their plan to put robots
behind the wheel.
"We're not a VC-backed company, so
we're trying to focus where we can make a difference," Gross said. "That
means providing an experience with all the benefits of participating in
the regulated industry, but with the level of service and quality that
customers demand."
"Regulation is not a bad thing. It can
be subject to overreach, but it should be allowed to exist, and to be
creative in the ways it solves problems," he continued.
"At the end of the day, we're all stakeholders in the community. New
York is also really serving as a model for cities around the country for
the right level at which to regulate, and how to solve problems."
Going forward, Gross said, "We
need to be finding out how to utilize the resources we have, and decide
to become more efficient in how we provide transportation."
He added, "I think we can do better."
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