Living Information

2003-05-13

[LEAD-IN]

1. Well, if you've ever found yourself wondering around a town late at night desperately looking for a taxi, well, that could be a thing of the past at least in London. A taxi hailing service is putting passengers in direct contacts with available cabs in the city via their mobile phones. Tony Campion has the details.


[STORY]

2. Red buses and black cabs. London's famous for them and they're famous for appearing in droves when you don't want one, but you're laden down with shopping and desperate to get home in a hurry, can you find one?

3. Well, one company says yes. You just dial one central number on your mobile phone and the call gets you directly to the nearest free cab. You agree where to meet directly with the driver. The service developed by Manganese Bronze is provided by Zingo.

"And its managing director is Mark Fawcett. Mark, what's the rationale behind Zingo?"

[Mark Fawcett: Zingo]
"Well, for centuries now in London, whenever you've wanted a black cab, you've had to go out onto the street or to rank to hail one and the advances in communication technology over the last two decades have meant that you don't need to do that anymore."

4. It works like this. Your mobile phone company tells Zingo which antenna you're making the call through so Zingo knows where you are to within a few tens of meters. It then locates its nearest taxi by GPS satellite technology and automatically puts you through to the driver, taking the risk out of hailing a cab, say late at night.

5. But not everyone's a fan. Cabbies are proud of the years they spend coming to places like this to learn "the Knowledge" as it's known, their way round London. And some see technology as a threat.

"I don't want the problem of it, that's all."

"I just don't think it'd work, maybe of a night when it's busy, say, coming out of theatres and restaurants, hard to get a cab, but..."

6. Even then there's no guarantee.

[Bob Oddy: Licensed Taxi Drivers' Assn.]
"Oobviously, if a taxi arrives, for example, outside a busy pub and there's lots of people spilling out or maybe spilling out of a theatre, it's possible you may get the wrong, the wrong passenger in."

And one aspect, which even in this mobile age, still seems a disadvantage.

"Please call back from a mobile phone to hail a taxi."

7. There are 24,000 cabs in London and so far only about 500 of them have signed up to the Zingo system, but that's not stopping the company having big, international, expansion plans.

"We've had people contacting us to ask us how it could fit into their country. Now, each city has a different taxi-using culture, so we have to adapt the customer service to their site and we also have to adapt the technology as well."

"Would you use the service?"

"Probably not, no. Because we've got quite a good taxi service where we live."

"I'd rather be safe than sorry, even if it costs a little bit more."

8. Two dollars fifty more, in fact, money straight to Zingo. The cabbies also pay the company 25 dollars a week for the extra business, but with 13 million dollars invested to date, it could be years before Zingo makes a profit.

Tony Campion, CNN, London.