12 ms·

Angry London cabbies attack Hailo taxi app office

44 points by choult 12y ago

Lockyy 12y ago
Maybe if if every time I used a black cab it wasn't one of the worst service experiences I can find I wouldn't be so enthusiastic to move towards companies like Uber, who actually provide a service that doesn't make me fear for my life at times.
- zyxley 12y ago
  My only experiences with normal taxis have all been ones where (a) nobody at the dispatch offices of any of the major taxi companies in my area ever actually picked up, (b) the driver didn't actually speak enough English to be comprehensible, or (c) the driver had no idea where I wanted to go despite referencing local landmarks. Uber and similar services aren't available in my area, but if they were I would use them in a heartbeat, given that their methodology contains reasonably good answers to all three problems.
- alanbyrne 12y ago
  Interesting. I've only ever had good experiences with black cabs. Especially if there are road works or traffic, they seem to know exactly which street to turn down without any sort of aid. The Uber drivers I've used in London have always used GPS and gone down routes which I would consider slower and more expensive.
BrainInAJar 12y ago
I'm torn, on the one hand we've put up huge barriers to becoming a cab, and cabbies went through all the necessary steps (including set fares, mandatory pick-up rules, etc) to be a legit cab service. On the other hand, cabbies are scum and the worst drivers in the world, and maybe we should rethink those regulations. I do think Uber's made "flaunting regulation as a service" and is pretending that making an app somehow makes them anything other than an illegal cab service.
- simonw 12y ago
  "cabbies are scum and the worst drivers in the world" - do you count London cabbies in that? They're pretty phenomenal in my opinion.
pling 12y ago
£38 from Guys hospital to Waterloo and back is the reality of black cabs. Bring it on Uber. Don't ask me about other forms of transport as I have to do the journey pushing a set of wheels around and I have a slipped disk myself...
- unfunco 12y ago
  I have fallen asleep on the District line meaning to change at Embankment, and woken up in Essex, this has happened around 4 or 5 times (usually after a couple of beers) and it costs around £120 (~$200) from Dagenham East to Camden – a private hire would be much cheaper – and I'd welcome it. Though there is something a little more special about the black cab and knowing what the driver has gone through to earn it, compared to any old numpty with a SatNav, it's just not worth the massive difference.
  - pling 12y ago
    Ha I ended up in Ipswich once (rather than Stratford). Don't really care what they've been through when I've been told to fuck off four times when I was in a wheelchair with a broken leg and with my daughter in a buggy. Just drive in now. An NCP plus the congestion charge is better value and Google Maps navigation hasn't let me down once.
    - unfunco 12y ago
      Fair enough. I'll give one more story as to why I like cabbies though, after a heavy night in Bethnal Green, I hailed a taxi (hungover) at around 6:00am, told him to drive me to East Sheen and said I'd pay him the next day because I had left my wallet at my friends. He said fine, took me home, and came to my office during the week to collect the money. Nice guy. We've obviously had different experiences with them...
- peteri 12y ago
  That honestly sounds unlikely as a fare. That's over 40 minutes each way on a time basis (by distance it should be around £6..7) Lets assume you did drive around for over 40 minutes uber would want £3+40*0.32p so they would have charged £16 anyway.
TheAnimus 12y ago
A classic problem with the free market. As it makes something more efficient, it creates pain as this change happens. Government rules designed to be protectionist exacerbate the matter. I feel sorry for the London Cabbie, he has passed The Knowledge, which I believe takes more than 2 years to study for, he pays a high fee for his license. But ultimately, driving around waiting to find someone needing your service is not efficient, environmentally friendly or the most convenient solution. Their days are numbered, it's just a matter of when.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  Well, you can call a cab in London too. What the drivers are understandably pissed off about is that they spent 2 years developing the navigational knowledge to get people from A to B quickly, so they could get their cab license, and now these other people are competing with them without havign had to had to meet any particular standard to start doing so. The London cabs aren't just a monopoly as in a lot of other places, they have a very strong meritocratic basis. I was extremely surprised when I came to the US and cab drivers expected me to know how to get to my destination. I said to one 'isn't that what I'm paying you for?' and his response was 'I ain't no computer buddy, find it on a map.' Of course the problem for London cabbies is that cheap GPS makes 80-90% of their knowledge redundant, so their hard-earned skills have literally been automated away. However, there needs to be a better response to this from the tech community than simply dismissing those skills as worthless. After all, it would be foolish to dismiss the effort required to get a medical degree just because of the existence of WebMD. This is more complex than a simple monopoly/disruptive competitor situation.
  - w1ntermute 12y ago
    > What the drivers are understandably pissed off about is that they spent 2 years developing the navigational knowledge to get people from A to B quickly, so they could get their cab license, and now these other people are competing with them without havign had to had to meet any particular standard to start doing so. No, it's not understandable at all. It's no different from Luddites destroying machinery that allowed unskilled workers to replace skilled ones. Progress might be a bitch (for the cabbies), but that doesn't give them the right to obstruct it.
jackgavigan 12y ago
Uber drivers will do the same thing when Uber start shifting to Google driverless cars. I walked past the Hailo office earlier (it's right next to a taxi drivers café, by the way). If anything was scrawled on any walls, it must have been inside. The outside looked normal.
jff 12y ago
> In the Italian city of Milan, taxis have been sitting idle for the past five days in protest at what they say is "unfair competition" from Uber. They just make the Italian jokes too easy... Anyway, nobody actually likes taking cabs, so perhaps rather than trying to reinforce their previous monopoly the cabbies should try to improve their own services, maybe with a cab-summoning app similar to Uber.
- jackgavigan 12y ago
  > Anyway, nobody actually likes taking cabs, so perhaps rather than trying to reinforce their previous monopoly the cabbies should try to improve their own services, maybe with a cab-summoning app similar to Uber. That's pretty much exactly what Hailo is currently.
aneisf 12y ago
Here in St. Louis, Lyft is under attack from the Taxi industry for not complying with the same regulations those companies work under. It's been an interesting battle so far. You can read about it at http://www.bizjournals.com/stlouis/blog/biznext/2014/05/testimony-wraps-in-lyft-mtc-court-battle.html http://www.bizjournals.com/stlouis/blog/biznext/2014/05/test....
joshstrange 12y ago
If every taxi ride I have ever taken wasn't so shitty I might care but they were and I don't. I live in Lexington, Kentucky and I don't use cabs very often except to get home from the bars on occasion, get a ride to the airport, and once or twice when my car got locked in a parking garage downtown. On 2 occasions I distinctly remember calling (or used online tools) to scheduled a cab ride for ~1hr in the future only to be called less than 15min later by the cab driver letting me know he was out front. Also I've called a cab on at least 3 occasions and they never showed up and I had to call again. Every cab I have ever taken only accepts cash which I rarely have on me and getting change back is awkward and so I normally end up overpaying so I don't have to deal with it. I have been patiently waiting for Uber/Lyft to come to Lexington and about a month ago Lyft came. I was ecstatic and signed up right away and a few days later had my first Lyft ride. It was the most refreshing ride I have ever had. Not only did I not have to worry about the driver not showing up but I knew what car he was driving and had his picture on my phone and so it was very easy for me to spot him. The drivers have all been very nice and their cars have been clean and took me straight to my destination without me having to give directions unlike the dirty cabs I've ridden in with drivers that barley speak English and don't use GPS. I will never use a taxi again if I can help it, Lyft has provided me with an amazing alternative and I would gladly pay double for a Lyft driver because the experience is so much better than a taxi. YMMV.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  This is about cabs in London, which have exactly nothing to do with cabs in your home town other than being vehicles available for hire. London drivers use specially designed vehicles the drivers go through an incredibly long and challenging training regimen, and they'r held to very high standards of behavior.
  - joshstrange 12y ago
    Do you have some proof for this? (aside from PR spewed from the taxi companies) Somehow I doubt that the citizens that use the taxis would agree. I may be wrong but just because the official line is "very high standards of behavior" doesn't mean that's how it works in practice. I would love to be wrong but I can't help but think the taxi drivers are protesting because Uber and other ride-sharing problems are stealing customers left and right due to providing a better service.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
loso 12y ago
This reminds me of living in Harlem and the battle between the gypsy cabs and the yellow cabs. Yellow cabs hate coming to Harlem and you will rarely see them compared to the gypsy cabs. But yet when Bloomberg proposed new rules to make it easier for gypsy cabs to operate uptown and the outer boroughs the yellow cabs union pitched a hissy fit. If the yellow cabs were anything but downright hostile to anyone going outside of lower Manhattan and midtown then I would have a little sympathy. But that went out the window when they forced my ex now but girlfriend at the time to get out of yellow cab after they dropped her friends off because she was going back home to Harlem.

44 points by choult 12y ago

Maybe if if every time I used a black cab it wasn't one of the worst service experiences I can find I wouldn't be so enthusiastic to move towards companies like Uber, who actually provide a service that doesn't make me fear for my life at times.

zyxley 12y ago
My only experiences with normal taxis have all been ones where (a) nobody at the dispatch offices of any of the major taxi companies in my area ever actually picked up, (b) the driver didn't actually speak enough English to be comprehensible, or (c) the driver had no idea where I wanted to go despite referencing local landmarks. Uber and similar services aren't available in my area, but if they were I would use them in a heartbeat, given that their methodology contains reasonably good answers to all three problems.
alanbyrne 12y ago
Interesting. I've only ever had good experiences with black cabs. Especially if there are road works or traffic, they seem to know exactly which street to turn down without any sort of aid. The Uber drivers I've used in London have always used GPS and gone down routes which I would consider slower and more expensive.

BrainInAJar 12y ago

I'm torn, on the one hand we've put up huge barriers to becoming a cab, and cabbies went through all the necessary steps (including set fares, mandatory pick-up rules, etc) to be a legit cab service. On the other hand, cabbies are scum and the worst drivers in the world, and maybe we should rethink those regulations. I do think Uber's made "flaunting regulation as a service" and is pretending that making an app somehow makes them anything other than an illegal cab service.

simonw 12y ago
"cabbies are scum and the worst drivers in the world" - do you count London cabbies in that? They're pretty phenomenal in my opinion.

pling 12y ago

£38 from Guys hospital to Waterloo and back is the reality of black cabs. Bring it on Uber. Don't ask me about other forms of transport as I have to do the journey pushing a set of wheels around and I have a slipped disk myself...

unfunco 12y ago
I have fallen asleep on the District line meaning to change at Embankment, and woken up in Essex, this has happened around 4 or 5 times (usually after a couple of beers) and it costs around £120 (~$200) from Dagenham East to Camden – a private hire would be much cheaper – and I'd welcome it. Though there is something a little more special about the black cab and knowing what the driver has gone through to earn it, compared to any old numpty with a SatNav, it's just not worth the massive difference.
- pling 12y ago
  Ha I ended up in Ipswich once (rather than Stratford). Don't really care what they've been through when I've been told to fuck off four times when I was in a wheelchair with a broken leg and with my daughter in a buggy. Just drive in now. An NCP plus the congestion charge is better value and Google Maps navigation hasn't let me down once.
  - unfunco 12y ago
    Fair enough. I'll give one more story as to why I like cabbies though, after a heavy night in Bethnal Green, I hailed a taxi (hungover) at around 6:00am, told him to drive me to East Sheen and said I'd pay him the next day because I had left my wallet at my friends. He said fine, took me home, and came to my office during the week to collect the money. Nice guy. We've obviously had different experiences with them...
peteri 12y ago
That honestly sounds unlikely as a fare. That's over 40 minutes each way on a time basis (by distance it should be around £6..7) Lets assume you did drive around for over 40 minutes uber would want £3+40*0.32p so they would have charged £16 anyway.

TheAnimus 12y ago

A classic problem with the free market. As it makes something more efficient, it creates pain as this change happens. Government rules designed to be protectionist exacerbate the matter. I feel sorry for the London Cabbie, he has passed The Knowledge, which I believe takes more than 2 years to study for, he pays a high fee for his license. But ultimately, driving around waiting to find someone needing your service is not efficient, environmentally friendly or the most convenient solution. Their days are numbered, it's just a matter of when.

anigbrowl 12y ago
Well, you can call a cab in London too. What the drivers are understandably pissed off about is that they spent 2 years developing the navigational knowledge to get people from A to B quickly, so they could get their cab license, and now these other people are competing with them without havign had to had to meet any particular standard to start doing so. The London cabs aren't just a monopoly as in a lot of other places, they have a very strong meritocratic basis. I was extremely surprised when I came to the US and cab drivers expected me to know how to get to my destination. I said to one 'isn't that what I'm paying you for?' and his response was 'I ain't no computer buddy, find it on a map.' Of course the problem for London cabbies is that cheap GPS makes 80-90% of their knowledge redundant, so their hard-earned skills have literally been automated away. However, there needs to be a better response to this from the tech community than simply dismissing those skills as worthless. After all, it would be foolish to dismiss the effort required to get a medical degree just because of the existence of WebMD. This is more complex than a simple monopoly/disruptive competitor situation.
- w1ntermute 12y ago
  > What the drivers are understandably pissed off about is that they spent 2 years developing the navigational knowledge to get people from A to B quickly, so they could get their cab license, and now these other people are competing with them without havign had to had to meet any particular standard to start doing so. No, it's not understandable at all. It's no different from Luddites destroying machinery that allowed unskilled workers to replace skilled ones. Progress might be a bitch (for the cabbies), but that doesn't give them the right to obstruct it.

jackgavigan 12y ago

Uber drivers will do the same thing when Uber start shifting to Google driverless cars. I walked past the Hailo office earlier (it's right next to a taxi drivers café, by the way). If anything was scrawled on any walls, it must have been inside. The outside looked normal.

jff 12y ago

> In the Italian city of Milan, taxis have been sitting idle for the past five days in protest at what they say is "unfair competition" from Uber. They just make the Italian jokes too easy... Anyway, nobody actually likes taking cabs, so perhaps rather than trying to reinforce their previous monopoly the cabbies should try to improve their own services, maybe with a cab-summoning app similar to Uber.

jackgavigan 12y ago
> Anyway, nobody actually likes taking cabs, so perhaps rather than trying to reinforce their previous monopoly the cabbies should try to improve their own services, maybe with a cab-summoning app similar to Uber. That's pretty much exactly what Hailo is currently.

aneisf 12y ago

Here in St. Louis, Lyft is under attack from the Taxi industry for not complying with the same regulations those companies work under. It's been an interesting battle so far. You can read about it at http://www.bizjournals.com/stlouis/blog/biznext/2014/05/testimony-wraps-in-lyft-mtc-court-battle.html http://www.bizjournals.com/stlouis/blog/biznext/2014/05/test....

joshstrange 12y ago

If every taxi ride I have ever taken wasn't so shitty I might care but they were and I don't. I live in Lexington, Kentucky and I don't use cabs very often except to get home from the bars on occasion, get a ride to the airport, and once or twice when my car got locked in a parking garage downtown. On 2 occasions I distinctly remember calling (or used online tools) to scheduled a cab ride for ~1hr in the future only to be called less than 15min later by the cab driver letting me know he was out front. Also I've called a cab on at least 3 occasions and they never showed up and I had to call again. Every cab I have ever taken only accepts cash which I rarely have on me and getting change back is awkward and so I normally end up overpaying so I don't have to deal with it. I have been patiently waiting for Uber/Lyft to come to Lexington and about a month ago Lyft came. I was ecstatic and signed up right away and a few days later had my first Lyft ride. It was the most refreshing ride I have ever had. Not only did I not have to worry about the driver not showing up but I knew what car he was driving and had his picture on my phone and so it was very easy for me to spot him. The drivers have all been very nice and their cars have been clean and took me straight to my destination without me having to give directions unlike the dirty cabs I've ridden in with drivers that barley speak English and don't use GPS. I will never use a taxi again if I can help it, Lyft has provided me with an amazing alternative and I would gladly pay double for a Lyft driver because the experience is so much better than a taxi. YMMV.

anigbrowl 12y ago
This is about cabs in London, which have exactly nothing to do with cabs in your home town other than being vehicles available for hire. London drivers use specially designed vehicles the drivers go through an incredibly long and challenging training regimen, and they'r held to very high standards of behavior.
- joshstrange 12y ago
  Do you have some proof for this? (aside from PR spewed from the taxi companies) Somehow I doubt that the citizens that use the taxis would agree. I may be wrong but just because the official line is "very high standards of behavior" doesn't mean that's how it works in practice. I would love to be wrong but I can't help but think the taxi drivers are protesting because Uber and other ride-sharing problems are stealing customers left and right due to providing a better service.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

loso 12y ago

This reminds me of living in Harlem and the battle between the gypsy cabs and the yellow cabs. Yellow cabs hate coming to Harlem and you will rarely see them compared to the gypsy cabs. But yet when Bloomberg proposed new rules to make it easier for gypsy cabs to operate uptown and the outer boroughs the yellow cabs union pitched a hissy fit. If the yellow cabs were anything but downright hostile to anyone going outside of lower Manhattan and midtown then I would have a little sympathy. But that went out the window when they forced my ex now but girlfriend at the time to get out of yellow cab after they dropped her friends off because she was going back home to Harlem.