It’s been more than 10 years since the movie Gangs of New York came out, but Uber and New York City taxis are now working together. Uber announced Thursday that its app will let users hail a yellow taxi in the Big Apple.
There are 14,000 cabs in New York City, and there are also about 80,000 Uber cars in the city. This is the first time that the two companies have worked together in the US. So, there are no more excuses for not going to your friend’s birthday bar crawl in Astoria, because now you know how to get there.
As soon as this spring, Uber expects to start the new service. Taxis and UberX rides will cost about the same, Uber said.
Uber has a shortage of drivers across the country because of a long-standing alliance of different-colored sedans. There is a good chance that taxi drivers, on the other hand, will see a rise in business after the pandemic wiped out the Midtown wave-down.
It wasn’t always this way.
Uber has always wanted to change taxi services, especially in cities like New York. This was one of its main goals from the start. When Travis Kalanick, a co-founder and former CEO of Uber, left the company in 2017 because of a toxic work environment and claims that he ignored sexual harassment, he was especially mean to yellow cabs.
On the campaign trail: “We’re in a race, with Uber as the candidate and Taxi as the opponent.” This is what Kalanick said in 2014.
During the last decade, taxi medallion prices in New York City fell because of Uber’s lower fares and easier driver onboarding. This caused about 1,000 drivers to file for bankruptcy. Some taxi drivers in the city took their own lives because they were under a lot of stress because of Uber.
Until now, Uber thought taxis were the future. It wants to put every taxi in the world on its app by 2025.
More: In Hong Kong, which has a lot of taxis, Uber says that 35 percent of people who use the app to get a taxi go on to use Uber for other things.