No reserved space for taxis in the age of Uber

THANK goodness for technological progress. The rapid evolution of smartphones, for instance, means you can not only make a phone call on the move but manage your diary, send e-mails and do your banking while researching and booking your next holiday, all on a device that comfortably fits in one hand.

Ten years ago, you might have asked your loved ones for a birthday present of a bag with lots of pockets to contain the multitude of electronic devices you would have needed to perform the same functions a single contraption can do today.

It was the industrial innovator Henry Ford who once said: “If I’d asked people what they had wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Apple founder Steve Jobs would quote Ford when challenged about why he chose to not listen to what his customers wanted. The products Apple developed were not needed, but Jobs knew how to make people want them.

More and more of us nowadays are getting what we need via those devices, and it’s upsetting the status quo. Naspers pointed out in its recent results that 85% of the traffic enjoyed by Tencent, the highly profitable Chinese internet company in which it has a one-third stake, came from mobile devices.

Just as the internet transformed the way we interact with the world, smart mobile devices are transforming the way we interact with the internet. And that is transforming a host of traditional industries, whether they like it or not.

The metered-taxi industry worldwide has been shaken by the arrival of transport aggregator Uber.

Uber uses an application that you can download for free. After submitting important details such as contact numbers and credit cards, you can, with a couple of taps on a screen, ask the closest Uber driver to pick you up at your location.

In return, you are sent not only their registration number, but a picture of them. A few more taps on the screen lets you know what previous customers thought of them. All the while you can watch the progress of your car on a moving map. Don’t like the look of the driver? Hit cancel. Wait a minute. Try again. Odds are another driver will be in your vicinity.

This week, police were stationed outside Sandton’s busy Gautrain station, where metered taxis commandeer spots in a congested slipway that the high-speed train’s planners naively believed would be used for quick drop-offs and speedy pick-ups.

The drivers run a complex rota from a traffic island in the shadow of Sandton City, which has line of sight of the station. The moment one of their cars moves off the self-proclaimed taxi rank at the Gautrain station, the next is summonsed to join the queue to take its turn in an orderly, long-established scalping of commuters.

I recently took a metered cab from Gautrain to an office less than 1km away: R50. The driver waited three minutes for me to pick up an item, barrel back into the back seat and deposit me at the Sandton Convention Centre, again less than 1km: another R50. R100 for a journey of probably 1 500m and less than seven minutes of journey time.

An Uber driver would have charged about a third of that, as would a tuktuk rider. They are also not welcome outside the Gautrain station. Tuk-tuk riders, for their own safety, congregate 300m from the station — just far enough to not disrupt the lucrative trade being plied on the station concourse.

Metered-taxi drivers have become used to the way they work and don’t like change. They have objected to Uber in every major city on earth. Rather than adapt their modus operandi, they lash out.

It’s a bit like oil-rig workers stoning electric cars produced by South African-born Elon Musk’s rapidly growing Tesla Corporation, or oldfashioned dyed-in-the-wool newspaper editors going to the IT department to pull out the plug on the server that drives the company’s online news offering. A bit like Kodak shelving its great invention of the digital camera years before competitors developed theirs, for fear of disrupting its lucrative film business. Oh, hold on, that last one actually happened. And Kodak went bust.

All around us, innovators are using technologies to disrupt long-established businesses. Uber is symptomatic of a far bigger change in the way we live.

Chinese internet sensation Alibaba, along with social media group Facebook and accommodation search site Airbnb, are other examples of new businesses disrupting estab- lished business concepts.

Facebook owns no content but is a global communication platform, Alibaba has no manufacturing or storage facilities but facilitates the sale and distribution of products worldwide, and Airbnb owns not a single room but helps users find accommodation almost anywhere on earth. Between them, they threaten the livelihoods of publishers, retailers and travel and estate agents.

Those industries are being forced to adapt their business models to survive. The taxi industry, particularly in South Africa, thinks it deserves a unique dispensation to maintain the status quo. Alarmingly, the government seems prone to listen to taxi drivers more than any other interest group in the country.

Imagine for a moment if the miners at Marikana had been taxi drivers. How differently that day might have turned out.

Whitfield is an award-winning financial journalist, broadcaster and writer