What The Hail? Taxi, Lyft, or Uber?
Curb is a new Rideshare app that is based in NYC, created to help the taxi medallions maintain revenue and attract customers. This is the first app that yellow cabs can work with, allowing them more opportunities within their industry. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when much of NYC was on lockdown, the taxi industry was hit hard. People were not going to work, going out for fun, or doing any type of traveling. Most people remained in their homes never even thinking about getting into a taxi. Now that the world is recovering from the pandemic there is more demand for car services and taxis.
This is where Curb comes in! Curb is the #1 Taxi App in the US that connects the user to over 50,000 taxis with the tap of a button. It allows for easy requests, scheduled rides, and contactless payment. It now runs in over 65 US cities and has been extremely successful!
One of the big differences that I have noticed when using Curb is that their pricing is set, so there are never unexpected fees or increases due to traffic or weather. No matter when I am going as long as my destination is the same the price stays the same. Curb is competing directly with Uber and Lyft who both use a surge pricing algorithm. Meaning, that depending on weather, demand, and traffic patterns your ride fee can be astronomical. Curb is offering legitimate value with this feature and has therefore been my go-to for the last 6 months.
Recently, Curb has decided to expand their market and has started exploring how else they can directly compete with Uber and Lyft. I found this out a few weeks ago when I was waiting for my Curb to arrive to take me to the airport.
I was expecting a yellow mustard car to pull up and instead, a small black Toyota Camry with the Uber and Lyft stickers in the windshield approached me. I was extremely surprised and upon getting settled I immediately asked the driver how he began working for Curb. For the next 45 minutes, he proceeded to explain to me how Curb had begun to expand their market and was now allowing anyone to drive for them, not only the yellow cabs. This means that they are now directly in competition with Uber and Lyft and are taking some of their drivers away. The prices on Curb are more competitive and the app doesn't take as much of a percentage from the drivers so it's a win-win situation for all involved.
One challenge Curb is facing is that their interface is not as good as Uber and Lyft, and they don't have the customer service to supplement it. According to some of the drivers that I have interacted with, one specific problem is that when a ride is scheduled ahead of time the app doesn't take into account the time it will take to get to that ride and encourages you to accept other rides in the hour beforehand. This requires the drivers to be more on top of their own schedules and to only accept rides within a certain distance — this is a big adjustment for drivers that are used to an app that typically manages this aspect.
Something that the App could be doing better is focusing more on their marketing now that they are expanding to non-yellow cabs. Currently, their marketing strategy has been to market on and in yellow cabs. This worked well when their business model only included Taxis, but now that they also work with regular drivers there are no advertisements alerting the Uber and Lyft customers to this option.
