Keep Your Friends Close…

After years of fighting tooth and nail, Uber and taxis are starting to play nice. The ride-hailing giant will list all New York City taxis, including the iconic yellow cabs, on its app starting later this spring, the WSJ first reported yesterday.

🚗 Driving the deal (we really gotta stop w/ the transportation puns)… The coupling comes on a wave of overseas Uber + taxi partnerships in Spain, Colombia, South Korea, Germany, Austria and Turkey, and is the first citywide partnership in the city of New York – one of the ride-hailing giant’s most lucrative markets.

• Taxis took a hit because of the pandemic, and are looking for a way to make up for some of those losses.
• Uber has the demand, but is dealing with an ongoing driver shortage – and this partnership adds ~14,000 taxis to its NYC arsenal.
• The ride-hailing giant also says 35% of people who started using the app to hail taxis went on to use other Uber products, like UberEats.

📝 Zoom in: For riders in NYC, the rate for a taxi should be roughly the same as an Uber X.

🚕 Zoom out: By 2025, Uber says it wants to list every taxi in the world on its app.