GMB - Taxi Demo Calls For Uber Transparency
Monday, August 7, 2017

Union calls on Uber to let the public know how their app stays on the right side of the law – people have a right to know.

GMB, the union for private hire and taxi drivers, working with the London Cab Drivers Club (LCDC) has organised a demonstration today (Monday 7 August) calling on Uber to provide greater transparency.

Around 20 London taxis will descend on Brighton city centre to challenge the workings of the ride-sharing app.

The demonstration will take place at 13:00 at Hove Town Hall, Norton Rd, Hove BN3 3BQ
The workings of Uber have been shrouded in mystery - with the San Francisco-based company refusing to fully reveal how it functions.

At a Trade Forum meeting last week, Mr Fred Jones of Uber would not discuss how the app functions.

Meanwhile reps from Streamline Taxis, City Cabs and Radio Cabs were fully willing to discuss their apps and booking systems.

Uber uses private hire cars (not Hackney Carriages) and such private hire cars are not allowed to be ‘hailed’ in the street. This is what the law states.

The Uber app connects the customer to the driver which is effectively a street hail.

Apps used by other cab companies in the city have do not use ‘direct hailing’ and any customer ordering via those apps have their bookings properly booked into their systems first and correctly recorded on their systems and only then dispatches the job to the nearest appropriate car.

Steve Garelick, GMB Private Hire Drivers'
Branch, said:

“Taxis are descending on Brighton to call on Uber to reveal how their app works under the bonnet.
“The company seems to think they can carry on as they wish, without proving that they operate within the boundaries of the law.

“Only Hackney Carriages are allowed to ‘ply for hire’ on the street – but to all intents and purposes that is what the Uber app allows users to do.

“We call on Uber to let the public know how their app stays on the right side of the law – people have a right to know.”

Andrew Peters, Secretary of the GMB Brighton & Hove Taxi Section said:

“We have questioned the council and Uber on how the Uber app works but this remains a mystery and we are looking forward to what the Demo can do in calling to examine exactly how that app works and we welcome the support of the London Metropolitan Taxi Trade”

Grant Davies, London Cab Drivers Club, said:
"The fact that licensing officers are unable to use enforcement causes damage to local trade, as we have seen in London.

"This cannot go unchallenged."

http://www.gmb.org.uk/newsroom/taxi-protest-brighton 
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Proposals to force all taxis registered in St Albans to be fully electric within five years have been scrapped after they were condemned by cab drivers.

Between March and June this year, St Albans district council (SADC) consulted approximately 1,000 drivers on the plans to write off petrol or diesel cars in licencing regulation.

Existing taxi drivers would have five years from January 1 2018 to convert to a suitable model - in a voluntary trial conducted by 17 cabbies between March 2015 and October 2016, carbon emissions dropped by 29 tonnes and £17,100 was saved in fuel costs.

Seventy-five per cent of drivers in the trial said they would use an electric car but all those who participated wanted more charging points - there is only one on Adelaide Street which is dedicated to taxis.

There were 136 responses to the consultation, with about a quarter of comments concerning the price of electric cars and about another quarter on the constraints on battery life.

Some others noted competition from Uber drivers not constrained by the same rules and on the limited options for electric cars, many of which are potentially not big enough for wheelchairs. 
The consultation concluded that although St Albans residents were in favour of the proposal, taxi drivers were not.

SADC’s licensing and regulatory committee have now decided not to make the eco-friendly cars compulsory, but to incentivise cabbies to make the switch with a licensing discount for electric cars.

Chair of the committee, Cllr Richard Curthoys, said the idea has not been completely scrapped but he is focussing on installing new charging points before the proposal is revisited: “The main thing is we need to do is get the infrastructure in place [before it is made compulsory], once we have that we have start to look at changing it.

“Obviously it would be so unfair to say ‘you have got to go electric’, and when taxi drivers ask ‘where are we going to charge?’, to say, ‘it’s not our problem’.

“The taxi drivers saw this as some kind of attack on them and no how many times we said ‘it’s a consultation’, they thought we weren’t listening, but we were listening.”

He described pollution in the city centre as a “problem” that he would like to tackle while in office.

http://bit.ly/2vHF6ht 
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Grab has launched GrabNow in Singapore, which allows passengers to flag down and connect instantly with a GrabTaxi driver through the app, a move the ride-sharing company hopes will encourage drivers to go cashless.

Grab is Uber's biggest rival in Singapore and this move will help the company step up its competition in the ride-hailing market.

After flagging down a taxi that has a GrabNow sticker, passengers will need to launch the Grab app, select the “Standard Taxi” service, followed by the “GrabNow” option. This will prompt the passenger’s and their GrabTaxi driver-partner’s mobile devices to pair through Google Nearby or a 6-digit code issued from the driver’s app.

The trip will then be registered as a GrabTaxi ride and can be paid using Grab’s in-app cashless payment feature GrabPay, or by cash.

The decision to launch GrabNow came after Grab realised that as their customers moved towards cashless payments, a majority of street-hail taxi rides are still transacted in cash because drivers found it a hassle to wait for financial institutions to process their earnings after deposit.

With this new feature, all GrabTaxi driver-partners with POSB or DBS bank accounts can instantly transfer fares collected through GrabPay into their bank accounts, and withdraw their earnings at any of the bank’s ATMs, without having to wait for the standard processing time of one working day.

“GrabNow not only digitises the street-hailing experience, but is also expected to drive more cashless transactions via GrabPay,” said Melvin Vu, head of GrabTaxi Singapore.

“We understand that many taxi drivers are still hesitant to accept cashless payments due to the extra processing time for credit and debit card transactions.

“We believe that our latest Instant Cash Out feature will encourage taxi drivers to embrace the convenience of cashless payment, and bring more taxi-drivers into the cashless society.”

Grab recently participated in a social media campaign with rival Uber to promote reducing traffic emissions ahead of Singapore's National Day

http://bit.ly/2uiglbz 
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