Punters return to black cabs after app price surges
WHEN you’re going on a night out in London, by the time you need to come home you’ve usually spent what feels like your month’s wages on overpriced cocktails and sixpound pints.
After already booking a cab to the venue, the price of a taxi home could mean the difference between being able to afford a hangover takeaway or making do with what’s left in the cupboards.
With the night Tube partially returning on November 27, there are still three weeks left when sometimes the only option is to get a cab home.
There are so many different taxi options to choose from so it’s hard to know where to start.
Some of the most popular taxi companies in the city are Uber, Bolt, and the traditional black cab. Historically, it has always been cheaper to get an app-based taxi as the companies behind them have hugely undercut black cabs’ business for half a dozen years.
But with increased ‘surge prices’ being put in place on the weekend, companies such as Uber and Bolt are becoming more and more expensive.
A surge price of 1.5x could mean an extra tenner to get from Central London to one of the suburbs.
During Halloween weekend, people complained of prices such as £48 for a seven-minute journey.
The weekends have the most surge charges of any day because of the amount of people out. This means traditional black cabs might now be the cheapest way to get home on the weekend.
Londoners are starting to notice this and black taxis are becoming increasingly popular, said one company. Gett, an app that allows passengers to book black cabs and private hire cars, says it is seeing 40 percent more rides each day for the traditional hail-and-ride cabs compared with the first quarter of 2020, pre-pandemic.
A substantial portion of the new business is younger people who have grown to rely on Uber, Bolt and other apps to get around London and other cities since they arrived in 2012.
But the cheap fares that enticed younger people have now gone. Prices are up by about a third this year, (Uber and Bolt) putting them on a par with taxis.
In recent years London’s black cab drivers existence has been threatened by these new companies.
Drivers even held protests against these companies on London streets because of the lack of business they are receiving due to lower prices offered by Uber and their similar counterparts.
Now, black taxis may well be seeing a resurgence, with some offering a cheaper service during peak times.