Tag: taxis

Barriers to entry in cab aggregation

The news that Reliance might be getting into the cab aggregation game got me thinking about the barriers to entry in this business. Considering that it is fundamentally an unregulated industry, or rather an industry where players actively flout regulations, the regulatory barrier is not there.

Consequently, anyone who is able and willing to make the investment and set up the infrastructure will be able to enter the industry. The more important barrier to entry, however, is scale.

Recently I was talking to an Uber driver who had recently switched from TaxiForSure. The latter, he said had lost “liquidity” over the last couple of months (after the Ola takeover), with customers and drivers deserting the service successively in a vicious cycle. Given that cab aggregation is a two-sided market, with prominent cross-sided network effects (number of customers depends on number of cabs and vice versa), it is not possible to do business if you are small, and it takes scale.

For this reason, for a new player to enter the cab aggregation business, it takes significant investments. The cost of acquisition for drivers and passengers is still quite high, and this has to be borne by the new player. Given that a significant number of drivers have to be initially attracted, it takes deep pockets to be able to come in.

Industry players were probably banking on the fact that with the industry already seeing consolidation (when Ola bought TaxiForSure), Venture Capitalists might stop funding newer businesses in this segment, and for that reason Uber and Ola might have a free rein. Ola had even stopped subsidising passengers in the meantime, reasoning (correctly for the time) that with their only competition being Uber they might charge market rates.

From this perspective it is significant that the new player who is entering is an industrial powerhouse with both deep pockets and with a reputation of getting their way around in terms of regulation. The first ensures that they can make the requisite investment (without resorting to VC money) and the second gives the hope that the industry might get around the regulatory troubles it’s been facing so far.

I once again go back to this excellent blog post by Deepak Shenoy on the cab aggregation industry. He had mentioned that what Uber and Ola are doing is to lay down the groundwork for a new sector and more efficient urban transport services. That they may not survive but the ecosystem they create will continue to thrive and add value to urban transport. Reliance’s entry into this sector is a step in making this sector more sustainable.

Will I switch once they launch? Depends upon the quality of service. Currently I’m loyal to Uber primarily because of that factor, but if their service drops and Reliance can offer better service I will have no hesitation in switching.

The ET article linked above talks about drivers cribbing about falling incentives by Uber and Ola. It will be interesting to see how the market plays out once the market stabilises and incentives hit long-run market rates (at which aggregators need to make a profit). A number of drivers have invested in cabs now looking at the short-term profits at hand, but these will surely drop with incentives as the industry stabilises.

Reliance’s entry into cab aggregation is also ominous to other “new” sectors that have shown a semblance of settling down after exuberant VC activity – in the hope that VCs will stop funding that sector and hence competition won’t grow. After the entry into cab aggregation, I won’t be surprised if Reliance Retail were to move into online retail and do a good job of it. The likes of Flipkart beware.

The “Per Person” catch

Every time a travel agent sends you an itinerary for a tour package, look for the units of the cost. Usually it’s quoted in US Dollars per person. The funny thing is that this is how it is quoted even when it is just an accommodation package where two or three of you are going to share a room.

I wonder if this is a way to encourage more spending, since the customer perceives the total cost to be a much smaller number when he sees “per person” than when he sees an all-inclusive number.

Like for a forthcoming trip, the travel agent sends me an email saying “the hotel will send a taxi to pick you up at the airport at a cost of EUR 50 per person”!!

On a similar note, I realize travel agents love to bundle. When costs across several hotels and trains and taxis are bundled together and presented to you as an aggregate (“per person”, again), it is easy for them to pass on overheads to you without you figuring out where exactly that overhead went.

There have been times in the past when I’ve received packages from travel agents, then tried to purchase each component of that package online, and found that the total cost of buying the parts separately is approximately half the bundled cost that travel agents impose!

Car Ownership

People, especially in the US, make a big deal about home ownership. In fact a large part of the current economic meltdown has its roots in the American craze for home ownership. Fannie and Freddie were created to help home loans become cheaper, then there was the CDO wave. Then came subprime. NINJA (no income no job amortized). All that. Boom. Bust. Jai.

A related concept that no one seems to talk about is car ownership. They say that the safety of a neighbourhood goes up if the proportion of owner-occupied homes goes up. And this is the underlying theory behind most of the home ownership craze.

|||ly, road safety is directly proportional to the proportion of owner-driven vehicles on the road. Take Bangalore for example. Till the late 90s, the traffic there was excellent and well-behaved. Some roads were already clogged, yes. But drivers were in general very well behaved. And the reason behind that was that most people owned their bikes and cars. They had a greater incentive to make sure that there was no damage done to their vehicles nad drove more carefully.

Yes, personal safety also plays an impact and is independent of whose vehicle the driver is driving, but I think in the progression of severity of accidents, vehicle safety gets compromised before personal safety. In other words, there is a one-way implication here – if you drive keeping in mind the aim of not damaging your vehicle, it is more likely that you are not going to get injured. The reverse doesn’t necessarily hold. And that is why car ownership is so important.

So what happened in Bangalore in the early 2000s when traffic suddenly became horrible? This thing called BPO happened, which brought with it the mostly chauffeur-driven taxis. Now, on one hand, these guys had perverse incentives as their efficiency was measured on the speed from which they got from point A to point B. Apart from this, most of them were not driving their own vehicles (this was a departure from the earlier wave of taxis and autos, most of which were owner-driven) and so they didn’t care so much about damaging their vehicles, which led them to drive more rashly.

Similar is the case with Delhi, which is known to have always had horrible traffic. Being the political capital, Delhi has always had a reasonably high proportion of chauffeur-driven cars. Which is why, for a long time, its roads have been known to be rasher than roads in other cities. And things still haven’t improved.

The thing with car ownership is that it forms a positive-feedback loop. Suppose the number of chauffeur-driven cars goes up. Then, the traffic in general becomes more rasher. And driving becomes more of a headache for you. Which increases your incentive to employ someone to drive your car. Which further pushes up the proportion of chauffeur-driven cars. This is what has happened in Delhi over the last 50 years. This is what has happened in Bangalore over the last 10 years.

In order to make our streets safer, we need to incentivize people to drive their own cars and bikes (one clarification – by own, I mean either your own or something that belongs to close family or friends; in both cases, incentive to keep vehicle safe is high). If I’m not wrong, people can claim tax exemption against the salaries they pay their driver. This needs to go first. Next, insurance companies need to have different levels of payout for self-driven and driver-driven accidents (I know this is going to be hard to be implement).

Yes, this might increase unemployment since driving other people’s vehicles is a major occupation nowadays. But is greater unemployment too high a price in order to ensure greater safety? (ok I can quickly think of one counterargument for this – if people become unemployed, the chances they’ll become goons rises, which makes society in general less safe)

Sit down behind the wheel, and be counted. Say no to drivers. Drive your own car. It is in your own, your car’s , other people’s and other people’s cars’ interest. You don’t need to be driven. You need to be in the driver’s seat.