Why I Still Take the Black Cab: The Case Against Taxi Apps

Walk out of a London terminus and your phone already knows what you want. An app, a pin, a car in four minutes. I don't want it.

I want to hail a black cab. I want to call a local firm and get a bloke called Dave. That is not nostalgia talking. That is a deliberate choice, and I think it is worth explaining why.

The apps look cheap until they do not. Surge pricing is not a glitch in the model. It is the model. When demand is low and they want your habit, the price drops. When you are standing outside a station at half eleven on a wet Friday with nowhere else to go, the price goes up. You are not a customer to be served. You are a variable to be extracted from.

They are also taking your data the whole time. Every journey, every destination, every time of night you travel. That information is worth something to somebody, and it is not you who is getting paid for it.

Now look at what the black cab driver actually did to sit in that seat. The Knowledge. One of the hardest examinations in the world. Every street, every cut-through, every back route across one of the most complicated cities on the planet, committed to memory over years of work before a single fare was taken. That is not the cheapest common denominator. That is someone who bet on themselves the hard way.

The local taxi firm is the same story told outside London. A company someone built, with drivers who know the area, who turn up when they say they will, who are not optimising your ride against seventeen other rides happening simultaneously on a server farm somewhere in California.

I understand why people use the apps. I am not calling anyone an idiot for opening one. But I do think most people have not sat down and thought about what that transaction actually is. You are handing your money to a platform that will use it to undercut the independent until the independent is gone, at which point the price of a ride will be whatever the platform decides it is. That is the game. It is not complicated.

The black cab and the local firm survive because enough people choose them. That is the whole argument. Culture does not preserve itself. Someone has to pay for it, one journey at a time.

If you have a black cab driver or a local firm worth backing, tell your story at keepthemopen.com.