If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em
Written content from Clayton Guse
Uber users will soon be able to catch taxis through the popular e-hail app the same company that over the last decade flooded the streets with tens of thousands of for-hire vehicles and pushed the taxi industry to the brink of extinction.
The city’s taxi cabs are currently equipped with technology to give rides via the little-used smartphone apps Curb or Arro. On Thursday, those companies announced a deal to allow yellow taxi drivers to take rides through Uber’s platform instead.
That means New Yorkers who hail a car through Uber’s car could get a yellow taxi instead of the unmarked cars that app-based drivers typically use.
It also means that yellow taxi drivers who take rides via Uber’s app will be paid an up front fare instead of the standard meter rates that are regulated by the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission. The amount yellow taxi drivers get paid by Uber is only regulated through the TLC’s minimum wage rules set for for-hire vehicle drivers.[More New York] Bronx rape suspect fractured victim’s skull as he repeatedly choked her into unconsciousness: prosecutors »
“Uber has a long history of partnering with the taxi industry to provide drivers with more ways to earn and riders with another transportation option,” Uber executive Andrew Macdonald said in a statement.
The move comes as roughly half of the city’s 13,500 yellow taxis are out of service — and as the pandemic has shrunk ridership on app-based services like Uber and Lyft by more than 25%, from about 663,000 rides per day in January 2020 to 475,000 rides per day this year, city data show.
“They’ve had a massive downturn in riders and drivers across the country,” said Bhairavi Desai, head of the Taxi Workers Alliance that organizes yellow cab drivers. “This is an industry that got torn up into pieces. The companies that tore it up into pieces are now going to work to put it back together.”
Uber in 2014 began to surge e-hail cars and drivers onto city streets, and by 2019 app-based companies had more than 85,000 cars on the street. The high number of cars dwarfed the city’s 13,500 yellow taxi medallions, which give drivers the exclusive right to pick up street hails and previously gave yellow cabs a monopoly on rides.
Uber’s surge caused the value of medallions — which many yellow taxi owners relied on as an investment — to plummet from over $1 million in 2014 to less than $150,000 last year, causing many cabbies to fall deep into debt. The sudden shift sparked a series of taxi driver suicides in 2018. Read more from DN
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