Evaluating the impact of Uber on London's taxi service: A critical review of the literature

Abstract

Uber is a very well-funded operation that has made innovative use of smartphone technology in the highly regulated and bureaucratic market of international taxi cab operations. The company has often adopted an aggressive approach when entering the marketplace in a given city, so the question arises as to how should the incumbent taxi trade react to such fierce competition that is popular with the public. This paper describes a literature review related to the taxi and private hire industry inLondon that provides a foundation to answer this question. A second paper will present recommendations to help organisations prepare a response to the new competition.From the collated journals, various themes emerged, and their reference lists were analysed to review recurring authors. The literature was organised into a thematic analysis grid to critique the content and analyse the implications for a project to evaluate the possible way forward for the taxi trade in response to Uber's aggressive approach. Six key themes were identified: disruptive innovation, sharing economy, business model, historical context, regulations, and labour.The literature review was extended to include studies of the same area in the United States. Caution was exercised, as the U.S. market operates different ground transportation services and regulations. Nonetheless, comparisons were drawn regarding factors that were similar.The identification of the six key themes will aid the taxi trade as well as researchers who wish to investigate the impact of Uber as and when it moves into new international markets.

Evaluating the impact of Uber on London's taxi service: A strategic review

“…The frameworks that underpinned their decision‐making (Ansoff, ; Bowman & Faulkner, ; Faulkner & Bowman, ; Porter, ) would be useful for smaller operators. Arguably, the frameworks could be more practical than the suggestions from the Skok and Baker () literature review, such as referring to regulations, offering unmatched services, and asking questions about value proposition, profit, resources, and processes.…”

“…From the literature review (Skok & Baker, 2018), only one study (Wood, Parry, Carruthers, & Rose, 2017) focused on London's transportation network, utilising a small sample of customer surveys and focus groups with passengers, taxi, and Uber drivers. A sample of the remaining literature concentrated upon the following types of studies: exploratory (Rayle, Dai, Chan, Cervero, & Shaheen, 2016;Stafford, 2016), case (Skok & Baird, 2005;Skok & Tissut, 2003), descriptive (Dudley, Banister, & Schwanen, 2017;Verboven & Vanherck, 2016), law (Elliott, 2016;Posen, 2015), and discussion (Gabel, 2016;Smith, 2016).…”

“…The conceptual framework illustrated in Figure 1 draws upon the three megatrends of Watanabe et al (2016) and demonstrates the co-evolution, which when applied to a traditional industry impact labour and regulations (as revealed in the literature review of Skok & Baker, 2018). However, the question mark remains over what has been the impact on London's private hire vehicle industry and what other impacts exist that have not yet emerged.…”

Whose resilience matters? Addressing issues of scale in supply chain resilience

“…For example, traditional taxi companies whose function is to provide on‐demand local transportation, adopted mobile technologies as a means to improve functional efficiency (e.g. map reading) rather than as a means to create a new type of business (Skok and Baker, 2019). At the same time, the widespread use of mobile technologies saw the entrance of novel platforms like Uber and Lyft into the on‐demand local transportation industry.…”

Multiple Utility Analyses for Sustainable Public Transport Planning and Management: Evidence from GPS-Equipped Taxi Data in Haikou

“…Poó et al (2018) [77] reviewed the working conditions of taxi drivers, their relationship to road risk exposure, and their consequences on the health of workers, indicating that it is necessary for taxi drivers to pay more attention to their health. Skok et al (2019) [78] reviewed the taxi literature and private hire industry in London and identified six key research themes, including disruptive innovation, the sharing economy, business models, historical context, regulations, and labour.…”