Digital disruption comes to the taxi industry

Digital disruption are changing the landscape

Disruptive technologies are changing the landscape now and into the forseeable future. The taxi industry has been ripe for disruption for decades. But only technology has allowed it to really kick in.

The reason that Uber, Lyft and others have emerged and are taking market share is because the existing industry is broken. Industries and business models get disrupted by smarter entrants when the existing ways no longer work for consumers.

There’s a battle for the future of transportation being waged outside our offices and homes.

A wave of new apps

Uber is one of a wave of new apps that allows users to see the nearest registered cars and hail them from their smartphone. Uber is revolutionizing the delivery of what we conventionally think of as taxi service. Customers can use its mobile app to call a car, pay for the ride and even rate the driver. It has given drivers an easy way to go into business for themselves, and exploited a considerable stock of private cars looking for a secondary use.

Uber, like the other services, does not have its own fleet of cars. The company acts as a digital dispatcher for people booking a car through its mobile app. Although Uber determines price the same way taxis do, calculating fares by time and distance, the service can cost 50 percent more than a normal city taxi.

Demonstrating against a technology

The streets of half a dozen European capitals will be jammed by strikes this week, as licensed cabbies in Paris, Berlin, Hamburg, Madrid, Milan, Lisbon and London where demonstrating against a technology that threatens their livelihood. But location-based apps are here to stay, as is the so-called sharing economy, which makes it easier for individuals to make a bit of money from property or services that would otherwise go unused.

Trying to fight them is as futile as King Canute asking the tide to stop advancing. If taxicabs want to compete against Uber, they instead have to go one better.

This is not the end of the traditional taxi industry, which will continue to play an important in the provision of urban transportation. The industry will change, though, with more taxi drivers eventually signing up with Uber, broadening and improving the services they provide to riders.

Transformation remains a critically important phenomenon

Transformation remains a critically important phenomenon across all industries. Many industries will face intense challenges and will have no choice but to radically change their established business models.

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Digital disruption comes to the taxi industry — https://www.torbenrick.eu/t/r/sla
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