Heading to Charles de Gaulle airport in France, taxis blocked all but one lane of the highway. Black smoke from burning tires obscured drivers’ vision, slowing traffic to a near-halt.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Dr. Ron Pitcock. He was traveling with a group of Texas Christian University students during June’s huge taxi strike in Paris. “A taxi driver hit our bus on purpose trying to slow us down.”
Paris is one of many cities where frustrated taxi drivers have protested, sometimes violently, against the rise of a new type of competition: the online ride-sharing service Uber.
Why are taxi drivers so upset? In most cities, taxi owners pay huge fees for the right to drive a licensed taxi, which customers can hail on the street. In America, these fees buy a medallion. These used to be worth upwards of a million dollars in New York City, but their value is dropping. When they were introduced in the 1930s, the medallions’ purpose was to make sure taxi drivers were licensed and safe. They protected the public. But as cities grew, often the number of medallions stayed the same. This made medallions scarce and therefore valuable.
Enter Uber. The ride-sharing service allows customers to use a phone app to book a ride. Drivers don’t pay huge medallion fees. The Uber app requires a credit card, making customers traceable. Riders can rate the driver. These features make the system fairly safe. Uber and other ride-sharing services are easy to call and often much cheaper than taxis. As a result, taxis are losing business.
So is anyone with a car and a GPS just as good as a licensed taxi driver? In London, becoming a cab driver is a years-long process. Would-be drivers take what is arguably the hardest test in the world, called simply The Knowledge. “Knowledge boys” begin by motor biking or walking down every street in London, taking notes. They go through a rigorous series of increasingly difficult oral exams. They must recite the shortest route from one place to another, taking into consideration factors such as construction and traffic at any given time of day. For most, it takes about four years of constant study to graduate from knowledge boy to cabbie.
By the time they finish, cabbies have a visual map of London’s streets seared into their brains. They will have traveled tens of thousands of miles, learning around 25,000 streets’ twists and turns, along with another 20,000 landmarks. But will customers continue to pay for their professionalism and knowledge? Time will tell.
So far, people seem to be voting with their wallets for Uber and its ilk. Unless cities jump in to regulate these ride-sharing services, they are likely to remain stiff competitors to traditional taxis—or even make them obsolete.
