Dang. Good thing London has Addison Lee.
Edit: who are a long-running minicab service who give fixed price bids, have a reasonable app, have their own fleet by dedicated drivers, and are usually price competitive with Uber.
Edit: who are a long-running minicab service who give fixed price bids, have a reasonable app, have their own fleet by dedicated drivers, and are usually price competitive with Uber.
In many ways they are much worse. Their own corporate policies and their CEO encouraged drivers to use bus lanes, to ignore cycle super highways (to drive on them), to ignore all parking and stopping restrictions - if fines were issued the company paid for them to encourage drivers to carry on doing so in protest of not having the same access as black cabs (who in return for their training and being regulated to be accessible, etc are granted access to bus lanes and other stopping locations to ensure that accessibility can be fulfilled).
They also fell foul of using drivers without performing full background checks, etc. And their drivers are reasonably famed for not knowing where they are going (at least Uber technology saves their drivers from needing to know anything about London).
Hailo allegedly did a piece of research to try and prove that black cabs were better than a private hire vehicle using Google Maps as Hailo had both at the time and had the data to compare.
The point of this was to enable a marketing campaign to sell Hailo for hailing black cabs because bus lane access and the knowledge meant that black cabs would be faster, etc.
But in reality, all they discovered was that for 99% of the time Google Maps was as good as, if not better than, the black cab.
Only in certain parts of London, at the worst of a rush hour or around some sporting event that has fouled up an area... does the black cab come out better by a small fraction, for a short window of time.
Google Maps is for all intents and purposes on par with a black cab and the knowledge.
This measure of protection is not afforded to uber drivers, nor are they encouraged to drive illegally by their company.
http://road.cc/content/news/56878-tfl-warns-it-will-take-act...
I sometimes see them racing one another in large lorries, especially around Mount Pleasant. The fact that they have such large vehicles, while also driving unfamiliar routes (i.e. turning down roads that most traffic doesn't) makes them worse.
This is just one data point, but I wasn't impressed.