Is it time to give the local taxi service another chance?

Not so long ago, there was a time, at least in Delhi, when a few sardarjis lolled around a charpoy under a tree with a name board pinned to a tree trunk that said: “Rajinder Taxi service 24 hours” or something similar. Black and yellow Ambassadors would be parked around them. You called, the taxi would arrive at your doorstep, the rates were fixed, the drivers knew the routes and life went on fairly smoothly. There was never a problem of explaining where your house was exactly because the driver was from the same area and he knew all the house numbers. If you were a regular, he would know your usual haunts. 

Then came Uber and the taxi-under-the tree became rarer and almost disappeared. Ride-sharing looked amazing, liberating, modern. Just a few clicks and you could be on your way anywhere, tracked by GPS in any kind of car you wanted. We were travelling the same way as someone in California was. How cool was that!

Now, a few years after Ola and Uber have become household words even in small towns, the sheen is wearing off. Yes, it is eco-friendly as a system and all that. But for an individual passenger, it is not fun at all to keep yelling your address each time to a new driver telling him where to turn and which landmark to look out for. After five minutes, it turns out he’s missed your street, so again you explain in exasperation. Meanwhile, you are getting late and tense because you never budgeted for the driver not being able to locate your house. The reason he is unfamiliar with any place in the city and solely dependent on the GPS  is because he is fresh off the boat from his eastern UP village to Mumbai or Delhi.

Not being familiar with even prominent places in your area makes him blindly dependent on the GPS and even if the disembodied voice there is telling him to take a route which you can blatantly see is the longer one, he will not budge. He is bound to go by what the tracker tells him. Indian roads are not laid out in a grid system like the west, which is where the GPS can work flawlessly. Our cities have streets with no names, narrow lanes which don’t even show up on a map or a newly constructed building in a suburb that has a dirt track as an access road. 

Only relying on the GPS can make the driver go in circles and crank up the bill significantly. The Ola/Uber driver has no knowledge of shortcuts and alternate routes which local taxi drivers have.

Then, there are the drivers themselves. A couple of months ago, I used Uber considerably in the Bay Area. There was no need to call the driver to help locate your house because it is indeed extremely easy to when the roads are in a grid system. The drivers arrived at the exact time the app said they would. No one cancelled or said they were unable to because they were stuck somewhere. Back home, I have had drivers merrily cancel for reasons like “main so raha tha, abhi utha hoon”. Other reasons have been that they are stuck in traffic far away and cannot reach anywhere near the time predicted. Or that for some mysterious reason, the location is showing somewhere else away from where you are standing, and he does not know how to reach you. 

The only thing common between the American Uber experience and the Indian one is that the drivers will chat happily about anything at all. One young girl in San Jose laid out her dilemmas about what careers she should pursue; a Mexican had recently returned from a friend’s wedding in Chandigarh while a Hyderabad software engineer played songs from Bahubali. 

The big dependency with ride share is on the mobile phone receiving a good signal. If one is in an area where the signal is poor or the mobile itself has less charge, it can leave you standing in the middle of the road desperately waiting while the blue circle keeps twirling on the phone. All of these problems are especially hard on older people who use Ola or Uber. Even if one has the app and knows perfectly how to use it, the other uncertainties that crop up leave them frazzled. This is of course, apart from the issues of payment and billing which as online complaint forums will show are a separate area of customer despair.  

Meanwhile, the local taxi services have upped their game, while retaining their old advantages. The cars are smarter, all air-conditioned and they aim to please in face of the competition from Ola/Uber. You don’t need an app, just a call. The service is personalised, the drivers and the owner recognise you, know your house and the area. If you don’t have change, you can pay the next time. You leave something behind by mistake, you can get it back easily. If you want to go to the airport, for example, or have many errands to run, the cost is the same as ride share or even lower. Plus you promote local entrepreneurship. What’s not to like?

Vasudevan is the author of the book Urban Villager: Life in an Indian satellite town