It's the dilemma every New Yorker has at least once a day. Do you take a potentialy cheaper Uber car to your destination or flag down that taxi that's cruising down the street?
Before, you probably just made a decision in the moment, going with your gut instinct or flipping a coin. However, you can now get a more definitive answer to your query about which mode of transportation will make your wallet the happiest.
OpenStreetCab is a new app currently in beta that tells you whether your journey will be cheaper if you take an Uber car or a yellow cab in New York. To use the app, which is available for iOS and Android devices, you simply input your point of origin (or let your phone's GPS detect it) and your destination. A yellow screen will appear if your trip will be cheaper by taking a yellow Cab, or a black screen will appear if taking an Uber is the way to go.
OpenStreetCab came about as part of a collaboration between the University of Cambridge's Computer Lab in the United Kingdom and the University of Namur's Complexity and Networks group in Belgium. The researchers obtained a data set that included the fare price for every New York City yellow cab trip taken in 2013. They took the coordinates of each journey taken in a cab that year and plugged them in to Uber to find how much that same trip would cost on average using Uber X, the car service's cheapest option. The researchers put their findings in a paper that will be presented at the Netmob 2015 conference next month, and the results may surprise you.
"Uber appears more expensive for prices below 35 dollars and begins to become cheaper only after that threshold," according to the paper's abstract available online now.
Because people mostly take short trips as opposed to longer trips, this "suggests that Uber's economical model exploits this trend of human mobility in order to maximise revenue," according to the abstract.
However, there are a few things to keep in mind with this study. For one, the taxicab data comes from 2013, whereas the Uber data comes from 2014. But as MIT Technology Review points out, the City of New York sets yellow taxi prices, and the last time fares changed was in 2012 after remaining constant for eight years.
Uber X prices also vary according to demand. Remember when you opened up Uber on New Year's Eve, and the surge pricing, higher fares imposed during times of high demand for Uber drivers, was such a buzzkill? The researchers didn't take surge pricing into account in their comparison of Uber and yellow taxis.
The findings that Uber prices may actually be higher than taxi fares may be a win for the yellow cab industry, which has become more and more threatened by Uber's growing share of the urban transportation market. In fact, it was recently announced that Uber cars now outnumber yellow taxis in New York. So clearly, the yellow cab industry needs all the help it can get.
[H/T Consumerist]
WATCH: Taxis Take a Back Seat to Uber Cars in New York City
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