Customers Calling Cabs Again as Uber/Lyft Prices Rise

With ride-hailing prices on the rise during the COVID pandemic, customers in some of America’s big cities have rediscovered taxicabs.

As MarketWatch reported on Tuesday (Nov. 23), cab ride volume has risen in cities such as New York, Chicago and San Francisco over the past several months, a trend that coincides with both the pandemic recovery and complaints about higher prices from services like Uber and Lyft.

“Uber and Lyft surge pricing has brought back a lot of people to taxis,” Hansu Kim, president of Flywheel, an app used by San Francisco cab companies, told MarketWatch. According to Kim, the company has seen a 15%-20% increase in downloads of its app since the start of the summer.

Meanwhile, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency says city-wide taxi use volume rose by 106% between January and the beginning of October.

On the other side of the country, New York City’s Taxi and Limousine Commission reports that trips per month in yellow cabs rose from 1.3 million in January to close to three million in September, a 116% increase.

The commission’s data also shows a drop in the use of services like Lyft and Uber in the city, from 15 million trips in July to 12.7 million by the end of September.

Chicago’s data shows a similar pattern: The use of Uber and Lyft dipped from July to August, while tax use did not. But the volume of Uber and Lyft use did seem to be on the rise in that city in October, MarketWatch reported.

Read more: Ride-Hailing Fares up 25% in Q3 Over 2019

That’s in keeping with PYMNTS’ earlier report about the services, which found that overall, riders were returning to Uber and Lyft despite higher prices.

“Even with prices being up … we’re seeing that as cities reopen, people start using the product, and they use it a lot,” said Uber Technologies Chief Executive Dara Khosrowshahi.

The two big ride-hailing services do admit their prices have gone up amid increasing demand for rides and a continued driver shortage.

Of course, this shortage means consumers no longer have a guarantee about whether they’ll get a ride, which is the one thing services like Uber and Lyft could provide. With that certainty out of the way, the ride-hailing companies are in the same boat as taxi services, many of which also have apps of their own.