You can still call a cab

It sounds old-fashioned, but I promise it works. It might even be better.

Photo by Viktor Forgacs on Unsplash

Recently I found myself in the odd position of having to get to the airport by car twice. The first time was because of a rail strike. You may have heard it’s a summer of strikes in the UK. Rail workers, doctors, nurses, paramedics, teachers, university workers, and even some civil servants are walking out over pay amid runaway inflation. The rail schedule was clear when I booked my flight, but by the time my trip rolled around, National Rail had planned industrial action shutting down all train service to London Gatwick Airport.

This was bad news for me, since Gatwick is extremely easy to access by rail and extremely difficult to reach without it. There is a limited coach service that runs to the airport from a central London train station, but it was already sold out. The only remaining way to get there was by car.

The day before my flight I checked Uber. It quoted around £90 to get to Gatwick. Competing apps, like Bolt and FreeNow, gave similar estimates. I went back to Uber to try the trip in Reserve, Uber’s scheduled rides feature. This produced an even higher fare. None of this was surprising. With the upcoming rail strike, you had to assume demand for ride-hail services was high, pushing up prices. Uber has also been open in describing Reserve as a premium product. In February, discussing results from the fourth quarter of 2022, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi cited Reserve as a “huge shift” in the company’s rides product and said 50% of those trips “are upsell, so to speak. They are more profitable than on-demand trips.” The chances of getting a good Uber rate to the airport were low.

A decade-plus of ride-hailing has trained us to turn to apps when we need a ride. Some users search for the best rate by toggling between apps, or applying a discount or referral code. Others might know a few additional tricks, like tweaking their pickup point or having a friend request the ride, all of which can affect the fare thanks to the advanced price discrimination used by ride-hail algorithms. But I’m here to remind you that there’s another way. It may seem archaic, but I promise you it still works, sometimes even better than ride-hailing. You can call a cab.

This is what I did the night before my Gatwick flight late last month. I’m using “cab” here to mean any sort of professional for-hire car service, from taxis to livery services, or what in London are known as “minicabs.” I did a quick Google and called up two local cab companies to ask about a car to Gatwick for the next morning. The first one quoted £79. The second said £65. I booked it immediately.

Here’s the thing about booking a cab these days: it’s a lot more streamlined than it used to be. Many cab and livery companies have an app you can use to book online, or will follow up a phone booking with a text confirming your trip. The technology isn’t as slick as that of the major ride-hail firms, but it does the job. And here’s the secret the ride-hail firms don’t want you to know: cabs can be a lot cheaper than Uber.

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It took me about 15 minutes to find, call, and book a ride with a for-hire car company. The £65 I paid (plus tip) was expensive, but 28% cheaper than Uber’s real-time fare quote and even further from its Reserve price. (To reiterate about those Reserve prices: while writing this I put in a trip to Gatwick for now, and again as a scheduled ride for tomorrow morning. The first trip showed a fare of £80, the second £115, a 44% premium.) And my ride was great. I would rather have been on a train, but the driver showed up on time and got me to the airport on schedule. I would happily book with that company again, especially for such a reasonable rate. Five stars all around.

I’m telling you all of this because it’s emblematic of Uber’s evolution from hyper-subsidized startup to mature, publicly traded ride-hail company. The heyday of VC subsidies is over. Capital, once cheap, is now very expensive. Investors want returns, they are tired of losses forever! Profitability is a real word! You can’t just make up the terms anymore! Money doesn’t grow on trees, unless you are Adam Neumann!

Uber became a global multibillion-dollar phenomenon for two reasons:

1. It offered a superior product to traditional taxi companies

2. It sold that product at an impossibly cheap price

The story is of course more complicated than that, but if you had to boil it down to the absolute basics, it would be those. Uber had a great idea (a ride, at the touch of a button) and it made that service available to the masses at an impossibly low price. I say “impossibly” because the fares Uber charged for most of its first 10 years in business were only made possible by venture capital subsidies and immense corporate losses. The cheap Uber rides that many grew to know and love in the 2010s didn’t actually reflect the real costs of operating Uber’s business, but the company’s kept fares low anyway to make Uber popular and entrench its global ride-hailing position.

We have now entered a new era. The post-pandemic era. The Dara Khosrowshahi era. The inflation era. The guys-we-gotta-stop-losing-so-much-money era. Uber needs to be profitable and you can only wring so much cost-savings out of efficiency. The rest has to come from raising prices, which the company has been doing for the last few years. The result is that Uber rides are no longer uber-cheap, nor are they always cheaper than that asshole named taxi. Uber admitted as much when it began partnering with taxi firms last year, telling customers they should expect to pay roughly the same for a taxi ride booked through the platform as an UberX.

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I would guess this is especially true on rides to and from the airport, which cab companies tend to offer at flat rates, and ride-hail firms often price extortionately. And maybe that makes sense. People who travel to the airport probably have more disposable income, since they are traveling somewhere. People who travel to the airport by Uber are usually choosing to pay more for the convenience of that mode. Airport trips include a lot of business customers who are less price sensitive. You can charge a good premium for all of that.

The other data point I’ll add here is that while Uber brought back shared rides last June, in cities including New York, and recently announced it would be “doubling down” on UberX Share, shared rides have as far as I can tell still not reappeared in their most obvious use-case: to and from the airport. This brings me to the second time I called a cab, on the other end of my trip. I was flying back to London from JFK and planning to get there by public transport, until I looked at the train schedule and realized my flight was too early to take LIRR, the local commuter train. Instead of slogging for two hours on the subway, I decided to pay a premium to take a car to the airport. Once again, I checked Uber, which again offered me an uber-high fare quote and no shared ride option. Once again, I did a quick survey of livery firms and within 15 minutes had made a booking—online, this time—with Carmel Limo.

I don’t remember what Uber and Lyft quoted me, but I’m sure that the $67.50 plus tip I paid Carmel was significantly cheaper. My driver showed up 15 minutes early, at which point I was still asleep, but was nice about waiting until our arranged time. We made excellent time to JFK, which turned out to be a blessing because that airport is such a goddamn nightmare. My first choice transport mode will always be public transport, but if I need a ride to the airport in New York again I wouldn’t hesitate to book with Carmel. (Also, they have a referral code program too! The VC influence is pervasive! Use mine: 1789930.)

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And hey, if you’re an Uber person, that’s fine, do what makes you happy. If you’d rather stick with one app than shop around or pick up the phone to call some car services, maybe because you just don’t need one more thing to do, maybe because the idea of making a phone call drives fear into your heart like an arrow (if the latter, you are definitely British), then that’s also ok. I just want you to know that while the ride-hail apps would prefer you forget another way exists, there is another way. It is slower and more old-fashioned and while not actually very old can feel positively antiquated in a world of on-demand services. But it’s real. It works. It might even be better. I want you to know that you, too, can call a cab.