Erik Benson has some ideas for improving the taxi service

Better taxi technology

RSS feeds for everywhere a taxi has picked you up and dropped you off. In-taxi "rate your ride" display. Statistics on your driver’s rating. Better credit card integration. Perhaps there should be a button for "need to get there fast", "want to take the scenic route", and "would prefer not to have conversation".

Classic!

He’s right, I think an overhaul of the taxi service is well over-due. If clean, reliable taxis with knowledgeable drivers are possible in an LSD-inspired rabbit warren (aka London, also, the black cabs not the mini-cabs), why not anywhere else?

The taxi service needs some tech updating too. Yellow Cabs have an online booking service, where you can register your details. This I suppose would be useful to a regular user, but if I just want to get from the office to tonight’s designated watering-hole, why should I have to go to all the trouble of creating a username & password. Taxis Combined have a better system – 2 steps: where I am & where I want to be.

Also, taxis use some serious logistical technology to co-ordinate the location of all the taxis around the city, why couldn’t some of that info be aggregated into one place. As far as I know, all the major cab companies use GPS systems to locate their cabs around the city. Why not put that info onto the net somewhere? It wouldn’t need to be real-time or anything, maybe refreshing every 5-10 minutes.

Possibly integrate it into Google Maps once they finally get on with getting Australian street info into it. This would allow you to see where the nearest cab is and how long it’s likely to take to get to you. The system could automatically SMS you when the cab is just around the corner, reducing the amount of time cabbies need to waste waiting for people to get out of the building (and not forcing people to wait somewhere where they can see the street).

This sort of thing would be more useful if it was controlled by some separate agency, like the The NSW Taxi Council, rather than individual comapanies having separate ones, but that may not be a commercial possibility (getting compeditors to work together & all that). Having a central location where a customer can find out where the nearest taxi is and how long it will take to get one would, I think, make it much more likely that people would use them.