Cabbies continue to feel the wrath of Uber's success.
The Financial Times is reporting that Knowledge Point, London's largest black cab training school, is set to shut its doors in December, pointing to Uber's wild growth as one of the main reasons why.
"Demand has gone down since Uber arrived," Knowledge Point founder Malcolm Linskey told the Financial Times about his school's dwindling enrollment. "Usually we have 350 students enrolling a year, last year it was 200."
Looking back, the United Kingdom's High Court ruling in favor of Uber last month — declaring that its ride-hailing app doesn't run on a smartphone taximeter and is therefore legal in London — was a crushing blow for black cab drivers, companies and even schools, as evidenced by news of Knowledge Point's impending shuttering.
One of the big reasons for the drop-off in enrollment is would-be black cab drivers had to pass a course over an average of three years, knowing upwards of 25,000 streets, roads and avenues inside and out, while Uber drivers simply allow the app to navigate their customers to their destinations.
Linskey had tried to reason that a driver empowered by Knowledge would know how to re-route during traffic or other unforeseen events and that some of his current students are former Uber drivers who had been worked "to death," but technology has seemingly outweighed any of his arguments.
It remains to be seen if Uber will wipe out the black cab business as a whole sometime in London and other places, including the United States.
