SAN FRANCISCO — Uber’s plan to attract more taxis to its platform in the coming years could soon take another big step.
The company is close to an agreement with a San Francisco partner, Flywheel Technologies, to allow Uber passengers in the city to call a taxi via the Uber app, according to four people familiar with the matter and a video presentation. of the urban transportation agency that was reviewed by The New York Times.
The next step is for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s board of directors to approve changes to a pilot program at its April 5 meeting. The city’s transportation director would then have to approve clearing the way for Uber and Flywheel, which operates an app used by hundreds of San Francisco cab drivers at various cab companies to accept rides.
The deal, after a similar partnership between Uber and New York City taxi companies was announced last week, would put an abrupt end to years of fierce fighting between the two groups. If approved by regulators, the San Francisco partnership could begin as early as May.
Uber has called the taxi industry corrupt and greedy, and a San Francisco taxi company once sued Uber in federal court, accusing it of predatory pricing. Some cab drivers oppose the idea of a partnership, fearing it would cut revenue and make it harder for regular cab customers to get affordable rides.
The similarity is especially surprising because San Francisco, Uber’s hometown, was one of a group of cities that sometimes aggressively opposed Uber’s operations. Uber, along with other companies that use gig workers such as Lyft and DoorDash, supported California’s Proposition 22, a measure that limited benefits to gig workers but banned them from being considered full-time employees. Though the measure passed statewide in 2020, San Francisco was one of the few counties that a majority of voters opposed before a judge overturned it last year.
In recent years, Uber has partnered with taxi companies, mostly outside the United States. The company said in February that it had added 122,000 taxis to its platform last year.
The taxi industry had lost customers to taxi services like Uber and Lyft even before the pandemic drastically reduced the demand for travel. The number of taxis in use fell to 400 during the pandemic – from 1,300 – before recovering to 600, the municipal transport agency said. Partnering with Uber would allow taxi drivers to access a much larger group of drivers, while Uber would get supplies in the form of hundreds of taxi drivers.
Last year, San Francisco approved a pilot program that allows passengers who have ordered a taxi through an app to receive guaranteed prepayments, similar to how Uber and Lyft work. The aim was to help taxi drivers earn more money, including by countering a phenomenon called meter anxiety – the idea that the unease of seeing the cost of a ride increase in real time on a taxi meter leads drivers to cancel ride or avoid calling a taxi in the first place. The upfront costs had to be equal to the travel costs, if calculated with a meter.
Now, Uber wants to join this experiment, with a twist: If San Francisco approves so-called “third-party dispatch services” like Uber to participate, the upfront fees Uber charges customers to get a taxi through its app will have to pay off. , not be the same as a metered taxi ride. That means they can charge the same price as a typical UberX car ride, which is often cheaper than a cab ride.
That scares some San Francisco cab drivers that they’ll get cheap rides that earn them just a few dollars. Others worry that price hikes — when Uber raises fares in times of high demand — could prevent current low-income taxi customers from getting rides.
“It just doesn’t make sense,” said Evelyn Engel, a board member for the San Francisco Taxi Workers Alliance, which supports taxi drivers. She said she and other cab drivers had heard from the city’s transit agency about Uber’s involvement in the pilot program.
“Uber is going to get hundreds of full-time drivers on their platform,” Ms Engel said, but taxi drivers “will not even get a fare that allows for a dignified life.”
Muwaffaq Mustafa, 53, who has been a taxi driver for decades and now also works for Flywheel Taxi — the company that once sued Uber — said he thought the Uber partnership would enrich taxi drivers and help save a struggling industry. The slightly cheaper rides, he said, would be offset by increased demand.
“I am optimistic if this deal goes through, we will make up for all these years,” Mustafa said. “More conversations, more value and it’s more money.”
George Lama, 60, a taxi driver in San Francisco for 20 years, said the partnership was necessary because passengers were now completely ignoring taxis. He waits outside hotels in a line of taxi drivers to pick people up, he said, but they order Ubers instead.
“Nobody’s looking at us because they’re conditioned that Uber is faster, a bigger fleet, cheaper,” said Mr. llama.
In December, Hansu Kim, the president and co-owner of the Flywheel taxi app, told a panel at a conference of transportation regulators that the taxi industry’s approach to technology was like “dinosaurs still in the tar pits.” and that he was talking to Uber to help cab drivers access cab drivers.
“If we don’t adopt this technology by default, we will be marginalized,” Mr Kim said in a video of the meeting, which was viewed by The Times.
Uber could benefit from the partnership by gaining access to potentially hundreds of additional drivers; although it said the number of drivers had risen in recent months after many had left during the height of the pandemic, many drivers still complained about low earnings and some said they had left the platform or reduced their driving as gas prices have risen.
Taxi drivers also benefit from it, says the Municipal Tourist Office. “The taxi industry is taking advantage of Uber’s high number of travelers and pushing that into the taxi industry,” Forest Barnes, a transportation planner for the agency, told taxi drivers at a recent Zoom meeting watched by The Times.
If taxi drivers see more money through the partnership, that could encourage some taxi drivers to use taxis instead. But some taxi drivers have trouble with the merger.
Marcelo Fonseca, 62, said he would rather “drive empty” than participate in driving passengers for Uber or Lyft. “My morals, ethics and principles would never allow me to be a part of that,” he said.
