[buro9]

Addison Lee are no better.

In many ways they are much worse. Their own corporate policies and their CEO encouraged drivers to use bus lanes, to ignore cycle super highways (to drive on them), to ignore all parking and stopping restrictions - if fines were issued the company paid for them to encourage drivers to carry on doing so in protest of not having the same access as black cabs (who in return for their training and being regulated to be accessible, etc are granted access to bus lanes and other stopping locations to ensure that accessibility can be fulfilled).

They also fell foul of using drivers without performing full background checks, etc. And their drivers are reasonably famed for not knowing where they are going (at least Uber technology saves their drivers from needing to know anything about London).

[zinckiwi]

Is there much value in "the knowledge" anymore, given the existence of GPS, phones, and map apps with real time traffic and accident information?

[buro9]

tl;dr No. Google Maps is as-good as the knowledge or better.

Hailo allegedly did a piece of research to try and prove that black cabs were better than a private hire vehicle using Google Maps as Hailo had both at the time and had the data to compare.

The point of this was to enable a marketing campaign to sell Hailo for hailing black cabs because bus lane access and the knowledge meant that black cabs would be faster, etc.

But in reality, all they discovered was that for 99% of the time Google Maps was as good as, if not better than, the black cab.

Only in certain parts of London, at the worst of a rush hour or around some sporting event that has fouled up an area... does the black cab come out better by a small fraction, for a short window of time.

Google Maps is for all intents and purposes on par with a black cab and the knowledge.

[dsfyu404ed]

That might be true for a taxi use case where few trips are the same but for regular routes knowledge still wins because you only need to have the software tell you to go a dumb way once to know that's not the best way to that place.