Taxi Driver Online

There can be no doubt that the option for us all to take our operations "offshore" or using the modern day terminology "I Clouds" may be forced upon us if we are to survive and compete on a non regulation platform. Throwing off our titles as Taxi Associations and becoming Transportation Platforms operating through remote unlicensed servers is something we may all have to consider.

The question would be, who is responsible for the bookings and what would eventually happen if a large part of the revenue generated from the taxi /private hire trade nationwide didn't flow back into the local economies that we serve, as it does now.
It is all very well setting yourself in a favourable position to get your snout in the trough but who is charged with clearing up the mess at the other end.

I think you will find that "all them years ago (circa 1522)" this is why Regulation was introduced in the first place.

I'm just about to enter the trade and been following Uber and taxi apps really carefully. Whether we like it or not this is the future and the way the market is going, and to survive we will need to adapt.

Anything that can score out uber is good in my eyes, so i don't see Get as a bad thing, i actually ordered a taxi using it the other night to test it out, wasn't as smooth as i hoped but still worked, the driver said he's making around £100 a week from it.

The bottom line being whether you are making £1200 per week or the above £100 it is still the same amount of work/bookings out there. On the basis that others are making more money - will we see more drivers giving up due to less/non survival money? will the pool of drivers get smaller overall? thus the ones who are left, will be making more money, but working harder!

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Common sense........is just not that Common.

Thanks for all the feedback. Some points that should be cleared up.

1) We are not taking work off the street and returning it to the driver minus 10%. We are making it easier for passengers who would usually call a cab, PH or otherwise.

2) We have promotions where passengers can obtain Gett credit, therefore we are actually encouraging more people to use cabs. These are people who would normally walk or take the bus. A customer in Edinburgh has managed to accumulate £500 worth of credit simply by sharing his unique code with friends.

3) The people of Edinburgh and Glasgow have welcomed this development to the industry with open arms. The cab industry is changing, and it's happening in Scotland very quickly.

4) Just to reiterate, we only work with licensed taxi drivers.

If anyone has any genuine concerns or would like anymore information please feel free to contact me on email address noted above.

A grand Spiel indeed, but the Drivers are getting less whilst their customers are getting nothing extra, the people gaining most is the App companies themselves.

If your not taking work off the street and the Buses and Trams are still doing quite nicely, and more and more folk are cycling or walking for Health and environmental reasons....Then the only place left you can be making money out of is the Drivers themselves, they may get say 30% extra work but lose 10% of their fare income that the app company charges them, That 30% extra work will become negligible after the extra overheads of the estimated extra 30% workload are taken out of the equation...in short they are working longer just to make app companies like your richer.

Sure, the customer gets a nice trendy app on their phone to play with...but they are not gettiing anything new that they did not have before.

Things do change, but like a lot of trends and fads this one will only be here until the next Technical wonder of the universe usurps it....Meantime Black Cab and PH Man will still be going about their business and serving their clients as they have since their creation.

My fear is, that when uber hits here it could cause problems and soak up business, i only really found out about Uber a couple of weeks ago and every city it goes to it seems to be popular with the punters, yeah the drivers are getting shafted and working for peanuts but the paying customer doesn't care about this, they would rather the saving goes into their pocket rather than the driver making more money.

It seems to me that app technology is the way the trade is going, and its either adapt or be left behind. Unless the apps get outlawed then we just have to accept and adapt.

If TOA develop an app that can counter Uber then i think thats the best way forward, but who knows how its all going to play out.

There by is the problem and possibly through time the cure....If there is no profit to be made from the job then no one will want to do the job in the first place, Once all the Deperate and gullible have tried it and discovered it didn't pay then the prey that these app companies get fat on will dry up.

It all looks great on paper, but there is no solid base to it, It's £billions of pound of Concept and Ideas built on a foundation made of marshmallow, It's not as if they own 500,000 Cars, It's not as if they actually employ 500,000 drivers..they just own a concept and an app....that sounds all to shoogly to last for long before the bubble bursts.

The business model uber uses seems unsustainable for the drivers, they will be earning the same wages but working twice as hard and putting double the miles on their cars, also i've heard that because they are so cheap people are taking them through mcdonalds drive throughs etc lol, but in my research the punters seem to love it. It is now in over 300 cities worldwide and in every continent.

I agree it is a bubble which will finally burst, but i think uber are banking on undercutting all the competition and putting them out of buisness, then when they own the market the prices will go up.

Its causing havoc down in London right now

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/com ... 32790.html