There are many kinds of knowledge made readily available by technology. The layout of London’s streets is one of them. Such knowledge is hardly needed in New York, where a simple grid of streets makes taxi-driving possible even for newly arrived immigrants, but London, the city of villages, was always trickier to navigate.
Digital mapping and satellite tracking have changed all that, but for would-be taxi drivers Britain’s capital presents another problem. The market for taxis in London has, until recently, been one of the most unionised, regulated and uncompetitive in the country. The biggest barrier to entry has been the need for drivers to do “the knowledge”, the test of London streets which lets black cab drivers use a meter.
For decades, the knowledge was a hard-won qualification for the driver and a valuable service to the customer. In the age of GPS it has become an excuse for a monopoly which Uber, the Californian upstart, is out to smash.
Uber has an app which helps the driver to navigate and is used to calculate a fare based on the distance travelled. Transport for London (TfL), under pressure from black cab and mini-cab drivers, brought a case in the high court to establish whether or not this app was, in effect, a meter. Yesterday Mr Justice Ouseley ruled that it was not.
This is a defeat for the mayor, Boris Johnson, who has backed such ideas as a minimum five-minute waiting time and a ban on sharing rides. These are as retrograde as forcing mobile phone users to stop and sit down when they make a call, and Mr Johnson should know better.
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The ruling is a win for Uber, but mainly for consumers. If taxis become quicker and cheaper as a result of new competition, that is all to the good. That is the knowledge that passengers want.