Taxis have gotten their ass kicked” says Hansu Kim, owner of San Francisco’s oldest taxi company.
Kim’s company, DeSoto, is changing the name it has held since the 1930s to Flywheel in an agreement with the taxi hailing app of the same name. The San Francisco Chronical describes how DeSoto and the city’s other taxi companies are finding times tough now Uber and other services have moved into what was a safe, regulated business.
DeSoto’s move is a sign of the times as older business models evolve; moving to an app based hailing service improves the experience for everybody in the cab industry and radically changes the economics of getting a ride across town.
The main reason for Uber’s success is being able to identify both drivers and passengers which improved confidence in the system. In turn, this changes riders expectations and taxi’s fare structures.
For companies competing with Flywheel the question will be do they participate in this service or do they create their own app. For the industry in general it makes sense to share the infrastructure but for uses it may well be in their interest to have competing apps with different levels of service.
As the levels of car ownership continue to fall, how taxi hailing and car hire apps evolve will drive the development of our cities through this century. DeSoto and Flywheel’s experiment is the start of many as older businesses adapt to a changing economy.