Riders Streamline Paying for Taxis by ‘Appifying’ the Ride

Sometimes the quickest way to get a ride is not to use a ride-hailing app and wait for the driver to arrive, it’s to get into the taxi line or to simply raise your hand to hail a nearby taxi.

With Curb, a ride-hailing app for licensed taxi and for-hire rides, riders who hail a taxi in those ways — or through the app — can then pay through the app. If they’re a business traveler, they can also document it as a business expense.

Those who have hailed a taxi without the app can enter a seven-digit code displayed in the back of the taxi into the app. This connects the ride, making it app-based, and eliminates the need to pull out a card and use the point-of-sale device in the taxi.

“The ability to ‘appify’ those street-hailed rides is very compelling from a corporate perspective as well as a consumer perspective,” Jason Gross, VP, head of mobile at Curb, told PYMNTS.

Connecting More Riders and Drivers

With the launch of a recently announced partnership, a larger number of riders may be hailing taxis. In March, Curb announced a partnership with Uber that will add a taxi booking option to the Uber app. The partnership will launch in New York City and then expand nationwide.

“Over time, and certainly through the pandemic, taxis continue to have a unique value proposition as well as being part of the wider set of ride-hailing options,” Gross said.

During the pandemic, Gross said, some passengers felt safer in taxis because the vehicles often have partitions, and the drivers were required by regulators to wear masks.

Beyond that, there was less of a driver shortage in this segment because for drivers who own a medallion or work for a fleet, this is their livelihood. Also, taxis do not have surge pricing, so their pricing is more predictable.

“We’ve seen some of the more price-sensitive shoppers come back to taxis on price alone,” Gross said.

With the new partnership with Uber, Uber users will have more rides to choose from and Curb drivers will be able to offer rides to a wider range of riders — including younger riders whose only experience with for-hire rides may be with rideshare companies.

As the pandemic winds down, demand for rides has been growing. Curb reports that since January, the number of Curb rides has doubled in New York City and tripled in Chicago and Washington, D.C.

“What we’re looking for out of that partnership is to tap into that user base of people who for a variety of reasons choose Uber, but we want to bring that opportunity to service that ride to taxi drivers,” Gross said.

Delivering Features Needed by B2B Customers

Together with these benefits, Curb also provides business-to-business (B2B) services that are used by businesses, transit agencies and healthcare providers.

These customers are looking for predictable pricing, full-time drivers and access to the sort of data that is provided by a regulated provider of taxi technology.

“What the corporations are looking for is access to data,” Gross said. “So, instead of someone turning in a bunch of paper receipts — which is cumbersome on the employee, it’s cumbersome on the travel department, it’s a reimbursement process — what we enable with the B2B platform is to allow those users to have a corporate account.”

With a corporate account, users have access to the data that gives them better insight into their transportation spend, can apply rules to when employees can and cannot use this form of transportation, can have staff book rides for employees or guests and have them billed to the corporation and can assign client codes to the ride so that it can be billed to the proper cost center.

“From a cost management perspective, having access to the data on where the transportation is being used, by whom and how much is an incredibly compelling value proposition for the corporation,” Gross said.