How An Eight-Year Old Ridesharing Service Is Beating Uber in Brussels
Last month I was on vacation in Brussels with my girlfriend.
It was her first time in the city, and I’d checked us into a beautiful AirBnB owned by a Japanese expat who worked at the nearby European Commission as a translator. We were in a charming part of the city, filled with quaint bars, beautiful parks, and ornate houses that dated to the 19th century. It’s one of my favorite parts of Brussels, actually.
But it was quite out of the way. To get into the city center, we’d have to take a metro from Schuman, to Parc or Centraal. Being the thrifty travelers we are, it only took us the first day to realize that it was much cheaper to take an Uber into town, rather than catch the metro.
An UberPop (the cheaper, shabbier cousin of UberX) would cost the minimum fare of €4 and drop us off exactly where we needed to go, while two metro tickets would set us back €4.40 and we’d have to walk for a bit. It was a no-brainer.
And that’s what we did. Each day we’d catch a ride and head into town, smug with the knowledge that we’d saved a whopping €0.40.
On our first night in town, we went for beers with an old friend of mine. Thomas is local, 21 years old, and one of my favorite people to drink with. He’s doing a degree in art at one of the local universities, and knows almost everything there is to know about Belgian comic books.
It didn’t take long for the topic of conversation to turn to Uber. We were complaining about the terrifying drive into town, and the way our driver weaved from lane to lane at unsafe velocities, narrowly missing other cars. But then Thomas said something that surprised me.
“I’ve never taken an Uber, and I don’t know anybody who uses it”
That caught me off guard. Thomas is a price conscious, tech-savvy millennial — pretty much the target demographic for Uber. In cities where Uber has near-dominance, it’s virtually usurped the traditional taxi, especially when it comes to the millennial market. So why is Uber failing so dismally here?
The answer is twofold. Brussels already has an affordable, reliable and comprehensive public transportation network. During the daytime, there’s no shortage of busses, subway trains, and trams. There’s almost no reason to even own a car, let alone take a taxi.
But there’s also something called Collecto — an initiative launched by the Brussels government in 2008 that is still going strong seven years later. It allows users to take a registered taxi anywhere within the city between the hours of 11PM and 6AM for only €6, or €5 for those with a public transport pass.
To hail a cab, you either call a hotline and arrange a ride, or use the official app. This launched in September 2014 on Android and iOS — around eight months after UberPop debuted in Brussels.
Once you get in the taxi, you simply hand over the cash to the driver, and you’re driven to your destination. It’s as easy as that.
The reason why Collecto is so cheap is because you’re sharing the ride with strangers, much like you would with an UberPool. In fact, the name “Collecto” comes from “collective taxi”. It’s not as pleasant as having a ride to yourself, and your journey will inevitably take longer, especially if you live in the suburbs of the city, but it’s cheap and convenient.
One of the things that’s most strikingly obvious about Collecto is that it’s effectively taking the Uber playbook, and using it within the existing taxi infrastructure to great success.
The flat fee means that it’ll inevitably be cheaper than UberPop, and there’s no risk of being stung by surge pricing which can see rides cost as much as nine times the original price. Collecto feels safer, too. All drivers are licensed and regulated by the local authorities. They’re proper, trained taxi professionals who must show identification at all times.
UberPop never felt particularly safe to me. When you hail a ride, you don’t see the driver’s license plate number, or a photo of his car. The vehicles are often older Renaults or Citroens, usually in desperate need of a bit of maintenance, or at least a good clean. There wasn’t the same level of professionalism or driver competence, either.
One UberPop driver had somehow shoehorned the Uber Partner app onto an ancient iPhone 3G. While he could accept rides, it didn’t allow him to use GPS navigation, so in order to get home I had to switch on roaming on my UK cell phone (which was eye-wateringly expensive), fire up Google Maps, and direct my driver to our apartment en Français.
Another missed the turning to our road. Rather than loop back through Brussels’s haphazard network of one-way streets, he instead decided to reverse through a busy four-way intersection with traffic incoming. That was a scary ride.
You expect a lack of professionalism with UberPop due to the simple fact that the drivers aren’t professionals. They’re people with spare time, a four-door car, and an iPhone. One of the diktats of the sharing economy is that you must lower your standards.
But you have higher expectations of taxi drivers. You expect them to know how to drive. That goes a way to explaining why Collecto has been so successful, with 142,000 passengers carried in 2013 alone.
When Uber launched in Brussels in February 2014, it elicited a furious response from the local taxi establishment. UberPop drivers were assaulted, and their cars were vandalized. The local authorities raided Uber’s offices, searching for evidence that they were breaching Belgian law on tax, insurance and safety. Drivers have been fined thousands of Euros and their cars have been impounded.
But for all the outrage, criminal behavior and government lobbying of the Belgian taxi industry, the only thing that’s really slowed down the pace of Uber is a product launched in 2008 — two years before Uber first went live in the San Fransisco Bay area.
Now, Uber is bringing UberX to Brussels. UberX will be a bit more expensive than UberPop, but the drivers are licensed, the cars are of a higher standard, and it’ll offer a similar level of service to traditional taxis.
But will it be enough to compete with the city’s public transportation system and drag young Bruxellois away from Collecto? That remains to be seen.
