The Black Cabs in London have a long-standing monopoly on picking people up on the street and providing a metered journey. This is mandated by law. To become a black cab (not always black in colour) driver, it is necessary to take an advanced test called The Knowledge where you are expected to know every London street and landmark along with best routes based on random street closures. It takes about 3 years to study for The Knowledge and there is evidence[1] that they have increased brain size as a result of memorizing all that information.
The other option for people wanting a car journey is the "mini-cab" which can be booked to collect from any specific location but must offer a fare in advance of the journey. In order to transport people for money, mini-cab drivers are licensed and have a background check done.
Uber drivers in London must have the mini-cab license so this is a question around the black cab monopoly. As with any government-provided monopoly, the incumbents are keen to maintain the status quo while the newcomers are fighting for change. Any advances that Uber makes will benefit all mini-cab companies and most importantly, passengers.
> Any advances that Uber makes will benefit all mini-cab companies and most importantly, passengers.
Except for all of the disabled ones, the wheelchair users, the ones who only wish to travel a very short distance and are unable to do so alone (the pregnant, mothers with pushchairs, the extremely inebriated, elderly, injured, etc).
The monopoly and some privileges (bus lane access, pick up fares anywhere) is granted in exchange for a lot of obligations including accepting every fare in the centre of London even at a loss (of time spent against the profit of a fare), for fixed prices, and without excluding anyone of any ability.
If Uber wish to gain the advantages that black cabs have, then they are free to accept the responsibilities and obligations that come with it. Which will of course mean changing their whole fleet to fully accessible vehicles and not allowing any driver to refuse a fare.
Black cabs have no obligation to pick up fares and will regularly refuse to take trips that they feel are inconvenient or they think will likely result in a return journey without a fare, even after you're in the cab. Want to go south and it's near the end of the driver's shift and he lives north? Back to waiting for you.
This is in comparison to the NYC system where once you're in the cab, they're obligated to take you where you want to go.
Legislation that obligates the driver to drive up to 6 miles, or for 1 hour, providing the driver has no reasonable excuse.
Later challenged by Hunt v Morgan 1948, in which it was clarified that if the taxi is on a taxi rank they have no right of refusal, and if the taxi is stopped they have little right of refusal. If the taxi is in motion then the driver may not have seen you, it may not be safe to stop, etc and the driver may have a reasonable excuse.
In nearly all cases, if a driver has stopped for you and you are travelling less than 6 miles, the driver has no reasonable excuse and is obligated.
Other parts of the legislation oblige the driver to help those who need such assistance (accessibility stuff).
The law stipulates a Hackney Carriage, once hailed, must accept any fare within the Metropolitan Police Area. If refused one should report it to the Public Carriage Office. It might not sound like it is worth it, but the PCO takes trade regulation very seriously and it will have implications for the driver, especially after repeat complaints.
> Except for all of the disabled ones, the wheelchair users, the ones who only wish to travel a very short distance and are unable to do so alone (the pregnant, mothers with pushchairs, the extremely inebriated, elderly, injured, etc).
I live in an Eastern-European capital city where cab-fares are more or less completely deregulated. If what you describe were to happen after you'd just ordered a taxi (either from the street, through a phone-call or through a smart-phone app), then all you have to do is for you to call back the taxi-driver's parent company and he will get at least a 2-hour suspension, meaning that he won't be able to pick any phone or tablet orders. If a second, similar complaint arrives about the same driver in a short period of time then his contract is terminated and he's free to go and work for another company.
And yes, it does happen from time to time for me to try a pick a taxi on the street corner and receive an evasive answer, and I'm usually too lazy to call and complain, but the beauty of a free-market is that in all such cases I was able to find a taxi-driver willing to take my money from the same street corner.
It's all well and good that it is written that way on paper but do they actually follow that in practice? Is there any reason to believe an Uber driver wouldn't make every effort to accommodate a passenger needing some extra assistance?
The cars used as black cabs have to meet accessibility standards. They have low floors and plenty of space internally, so it's easy for a person in a wheelchair, or a standing person of limited mobility, to get into one.
The cars used as minicabs do not have to meet any such standards. Having tried to help a disabled acquaintance get into one, i can testify that it is not easy.
There is no reason why someone cannot come up with a service to cater to the needs of the disabled. Hence, there is no reason to grant monopoly status just because you agree too.
Uber should not have too. Now I can see granting some exceptions to companies that agree to do so, bus lanes and extra time idling.
We can simply come up with more and more burdens until competition is impossible, its not hard. Everyone can come up with a reason for their need. I do not not discount the needs of the handicap but they are used more for preventing business than facilitating new ones and usually not by those who are actually handicapped
Why would the 99% of people who are able to exit and enter a regular car, benefit from being carted around in a "fully accessible vehicle?"
What's wrong with simply providing a transportation allowance, or means tested reimbursements, to those few who may need it, and set it high enough that it becomes profitable for a reasonable fraction of car for hire drivers to equip their car to deal with them?
>> Why would the 99% of people who are able to exit and enter a regular building with stairs, benefit from ramps around a "fully accessible building?"
What's wrong with simply providing an allowance, or means tested reimbursements, to those few who may need it, and set it high enough that it becomes profitable for a reasonable fraction of supermarkets to equip their building to deal with them?
Fixed that for you.
Damn disabled people and their inconvenient needs. They should just be disabled elsewhere away from the commercial companies you hold dear.
One of the key benefits of The Knowledge is that I can jump in a black cab in London and say "Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons" and have a driver who can instantly decide which way to go...
1. Without asking for any clarification
2. Without typing a bunch of stuff into a GPS device
3. And with knowledge of time/space specific optimizations
Yes, black cabs are not cheap. You are getting a very specific service for that money.
What if you don't want to pay for that specific service? I got a taxi home (not in London) last week and the taxi driver used his sat nav to route me home. It didn't bother me in the slightest.
Pretty much all I ask for in a taxi is get me from where I am to where I want to go, as quickly, cheaply and safely as possible. I'm not against people being licenced (that comes into the "safely" bit of my requirements), but if they can achieve the "quickly" bit just as easily with a free app on their smartphone as they could with 3 years worth of studying, allowing them to provide the service more cheaply, then I'm all for it.
London doesn't have a grid structure. When there's a closure or delay on one route, it's not as simple as choosing the next road over. GPSes vary in their quality for routing diversions, but in a maze of one-way streets, turning restrictions and temporary / permanent rerouting in effect, a human is always going to be better. GPS maps are often out of date as London is constantly changing with rat-runs being closed down and new railway lines being built.
And "The Knowledge" doesn't provide the ability for taxi drivers to psychopathically become aware of delays in traffic on a given road. I've never noticed any particular difference in the amount of time I've been stuck in traffic when travelling in black cabs or in taxis with drivers using a GPS.
Which usually involves several minutes of waiting, as opposed to simply flagging one down as it's passing, which you're allowed to do with a black cab.
As a singular anecdotal counterpoint, I've yet to get in a cab and say e.g. "Greenwich" or "Blackheath" and have those three points happen. I've had worse though - I've got a cab from Lewisham Station to Maze Hill and had to direct them most of the way ("left, right up the hill, turn right, turn left, stop").
Meh. My last black cab experience was supposed to take me from Paddington Station to the Marriott Marble Arch. The cab dropped me at Marriott Park Lane and sped off before I realized he had left me at the wrong hotel.
I'm convinced he did this on purpose. It was rush hour, there was a bomb scare nearby, and I assume he didn't want to sit in traffic. Of course, if he had just explained that to me, I would have been happy to walk the remaining few blocks. Instead, I was just left at the wrong location and a bit confused.
There's no monopoly, there's merely a minimum standard defined by law. You're free to complete The Knowledge to become a cabbie, or a medical degree to become a doctor.
And that is great, but some price-conscious customers might be ok with driver entering location into gps and spending extra 15 minutes in traffic in exchange for lower price. Just give a chose to customers, not outright ban uber.
I had a neighbour that was doing the knowledge. We used to hear him practise in the back garden with his wife. Hearing her shout random routes at him like "Buckingham Palace to Bank Tube" and him spouting one road name after another was pretty amazing.
If you're ever in London and you see a guy (or girl) on a bashed up moped with a clipboard strapped to the handlebars, they are learning their routes for The Knowledge.
Google isn't (yet) quite as good at predicting traffic though. For example, a cabby would know that if a Chelsea game's finishing at 5pm, he should avoid Stamford Bridge.
Thanks, that's a great example of where the real-time data collection is not as good as the local knowledge! Unfortunately that depends on whether the driver cares about football (or similar events in the city). I hope that waze/google/other services will start including information like that in the future.
Absolutely, and I honestly don't think we're far away from Google or someone (...but probably Google) integrating all of this data. Times for football fixtures, events at the O2 and planned demonstrations are all accessible online, it's just a case of an automated system parsing them and deciding the impact.
TFL and AA road watch know that so there is no reason Google couldn't. It's all data - after all the cabby most likely got it from the same data through a different aggregation medium (radio/paper).
But in 2014, there should be no need to make people memorize those thing to the risk of their heads exploding. Maybe if the Black Cabs had used their network to create an AI-powered optimal route-finding system, they wouldn't be afraid of competition.
Having taken a non black cab yesterday which involved the driver reprogramming the sat-nav, whilst talking on his Bluetooth and handing my friend a business card, I'm OK with relying on human knowledge once in a while.
I may not have all the facts, but I think it's fine for the black cabs to offer a luxury service that you need to pass a hard test to join. This is distinct from making it illegal for someone else to offer an inferior service at a discounted price.
I don't know - some modern satnav systems are able to get hold of live traffic info and suchlike. That was always the point of The Knowledge - to know (for example) which major thoroughfares to avoid so you aren't going to be sitting in gridlock for an hour, however counterintuitive such evasive manoeuvres might be to an automated route finder.
The better informed the satnav, the less valuable that is.
I don't want to say "that should be easy to do," but I'd be shell-shocked if any company with experience doing navigation systems couldn't figure this out without too much trouble.
Also, even if GPS signals are hard to get in London, navigation in a fixed city can be calculated in lots of different ways. Allowing for some regulatory limits, a company (or an experienced third-party) could scatter their own transmitters around the city as needed, figuring out which frequencies give the best accuracy.
Google maps already integrates with Uber. If they managed to get such connection, I'm not sure why a bigger black cab company operating in large cities couldn't get an agreement to include taxi/bus lanes on a separate app. Can't imagine Uber forced Google to cooperate with them...
Google Ventures are an Uber investor, I'm not sure if that's what sparked the integration but it probably didn't hurt!
I'm not sure if there's actually a comprehensive source for bus lane data - if there is, it would be really useful for motorbike users too (who can generally use bus lanes).
Isn't Google -- through Google Ventures -- a significant investor in Uber? That kind of may give them a different set of considerations than "a bigger black cab company" would have.
Sure and I think we're in agreement - Google proved it will do something nice for a taxi company if they profit from it. It's just a very specific kind of profit in this case.
Well, that's a simple software problem with street definitions. Much simpler to fix than what amounts to implementing a GPS/pathfinding system inside someone's head for even one driver.
For the purpose of my and other people's safety, I don't want my taxi driver to be constantly looking at the phone at the busiest junctions, neither do I want to explain to them how to spell a given street name so that they can type it in their phone in the middle of a busy street during the rush hour.
It's not "constantly looking at the phone", it's the plain old "using navigation in your car" that many people already do. AFAIK, safe driving with navigation is a long-solved problem.
Simpy by sheer logic the very act of using a navigation aid (phone, Sat Nav, map) must result in decreased attention to the mechanical process of driving.
I would challenge that safe navigation is a long solved problem.
Who solved it? How? How was it measured? When was it solved - 2013? 2004?
The other option for people wanting a car journey is the "mini-cab" which can be booked to collect from any specific location but must offer a fare in advance of the journey. In order to transport people for money, mini-cab drivers are licensed and have a background check done.
Uber drivers in London must have the mini-cab license so this is a question around the black cab monopoly. As with any government-provided monopoly, the incumbents are keen to maintain the status quo while the newcomers are fighting for change. Any advances that Uber makes will benefit all mini-cab companies and most importantly, passengers.
[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/677048.stm