London Taxis are voted the best in the world year after year. People who come to our Capital City from all over the planet love us. But for how much longer?
New technology in the form of smart phone Apps is coming at us like a freight train, and if as a trade we don't accept and embrace this new technology for ourselves, then I'm afraid the end is nigh!
No longer is our trade, the oldest licensed taxi trade in the world, just competing against cowboy mini-cab outfits. Ones that will send a man wearing a string vest and a baseball cap to pick you up, in a car that looks like it's been used for banger racing. A slightly smelly man who will eventually get you to where you'd like to go, providing you can tell him the way. Now we are competing against multi million pound, Private Hire businesses, that send a driver wearing a suit, driving a brand new car. People don't have to even speak to a controller any more. One tap on their iphone and it's done.
Apart from having a licensing authority in TFL that appears to go out of it's way to bring our trade down, and a Mayor that understands as much about Hackney Carriage Law as I do about being a privileged toff, our worst enemy is ourselves. Without doubt, standards are slipping.
We have three types of London cabby: the majority, like myself, who are honest, work hard, are polite to the customers, try to help with luggage whenever possible, dress smartly and keep a clean cab; you have those that see themselves as a Arthur Daley type character. That is if Arthur Daley ever decided to start shopping in Sports Direct; and thirdly you have the old dinosaur cabby that will tell you an App is no good to him because he can't use a smartphone. Although they seem to manage to watch the 4.40 at Kempton Park on one, whilst smoking a fag in the front of a 14 year old cab. I look around the cab ranks at my fellow cabbies sometimes and I despair. Not just by the way they dress, but by the way they conduct themselves in public.
So how as a trade do we fight back and compete?
Firstly, we must have an app of our own, preferably like the one coming soon that is run by cab drivers, for cab drivers. We don't need a billionaire that wants to conquer the world, just an App that the public can use to call us from a restaurant or the 24th floor of their luxury apartment block (that's a block of flats to anyone born in London). Secondly, we need to up our game, smarten up and offer top customer service.
Our tariffs are set by TFL and by Law we have to work on a meter. We can't do what some private hire firms do and charge a ridiculously low price when it's a bit quiet, and a outrageously expensive price when it's busy. Our fares stay the same whether it's a busy Friday night in July or a quiet Monday afternoon in January. So what we have to do is offer the best customer service we can.
We have two great selling points: The famous Knowledge of London, and a world renowned brand called - The Black Cab, which millions of people see as a London icon. Many industries would kill for a brand that strong. We also have Taxi ranks in many prime locations, most importantly, the rail terminals.
So instead of looking at these Apps as some sort of threat to us, we should be looking at them as an opportunity to compete in the modern world and keep the London Cab Trade about for another 300 years. If there's one thing that we can take from the Hailo debacle, is that before Russel Hall & Co. stabbed us in the back, it showed that given access to the App technology, many members of the public chose to use a black cab over all the different Private Hire ones.
Many of Britain's old, traditional industries like: mining, shipbuilding and printing had the chance to modernise but chose to fight new technology, and died. Some, like the car industry, chose to embrace change and are today thriving.
So what I say to London Cabbies is let's be like the car industry and accept change and once again become the Rolls Royce of the taxi industry.
