The Hackney Carriage driver has had a rough time of late. Choking London traffic, abuse from the Mayor and now Uber. What’s a cabbie to do?
Typically, it can take several years to qualify for your badge. It’s called The Knowledge. Aspiring cabbies will cover tens of thousands of miles, perhaps on a scooter or bike, memorising hundreds of runs, locating thousands of streets. You have to learn the 25,000 streets, 20,000 landmarks and 320 routes within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross that make it up. Every London cabbie must pass to get a licence.
However, fewer would-be taxi drivers are studying for The Knowledge. Recent figures from Transport For London show the number of candidates fell from 3,326 in 2012, to 2,159 in 2013. Coincidentally, 2012 is the year Uber launched in the city and the London taxi has been on a collision course with the Uber cab ever since.
Tech war
The root of the problem lies with the drivers’ differing boxes of tech; the smartphone with the Uber app vs the taximeter. The Knowledge earns a driver the right to a taximeter in their black cab and it means they should always know the quickest route to the destination, without a satnav. A recent survey by road safety charity Brake found one in seven drivers admit making risky manoeuvres to correct satnav errors, while one in 14 have narrowly avoided a crash from being distracted by their GPS.
According to Travis Kalanick (computer programmer and Uber co-founder), there are 15,000 Uber drivers in London, and rising, so its streets might get more dangerous. This has even prompted Boris Johnson to propose a mini version of The Knowledge for Uber drivers.
The surge
What many customers don’t realise is that taximeter tariffs are not as discriminatory as Uber’s “surge pricing”, which pushes prices up at peak times and during big events or even in bad weather. During the recent Tube strike, Uber rides cost up to three times the usual rate. However, Uber claims this affects less than 10 per cent of all trips, and most of the time UberX is still 40 per cent cheaper than a local taxi.
People’s perception of the new cabs was represented in Uber’s recent YouGov Value score of +7, recording whether people think the service is good value. This was in spite of a Buzz score of -7. These polls were based on whether people had heard something positive or negative about a brand in the last two weeks. It suggests that no matter how much bad press Uber gets, its customers still think the service is good value.
“Uber is here to stay, so black-cab drivers must respond in kind,” says Christian Wolmar, a transport analyst. “They need to develop their own app and improve their service in the London suburbs, or more and more of their business will be eroded.”
However, classic cabbies can rely on some passenger groups, notably tourists. These are the cabbies’ aces in the hole. Tourists want a Hackney Carriage because it’s a mobile monument, as iconic as Big Ben. According to the latest figures from the Office For National Statistics, more tourists are now visiting London than ever, more than 46,000 a day; all looking for a famous black cab.
So it seems the yellow lights are in no danger of going out along the city’s famous streets, but in the ratruns and backstreets of the boroughs, the battle has only just begun.
Title Image Credit: Lars Plougmann (Image Cropped)