Last February, after Uber, the app-based ride-sharing company, announced its intention to enter the Houston market, local cab drivers crammed into a city council meeting wearing bright-yellow T-shirts with slogans like \u201cFair Play = Same Rules.\u201d They claimed that Uber, which usually charges less than traditional cabs do, has an advantage because its drivers don\u2019t have to meet the same insurance requirements as most cabbies. By the time the city council granted Uber the right to operate, last summer, the debate had raged for months, and local cab companies had sued Uber and its rival, Lyft. Uber has faced a similar backlash in Dallas, where the city has yet to finalize new ride-sharing rules. \u00a0<\/p>\n
On the High Plains, though, things have been a lot quieter, as usual. Uber began serving Lubbock in June, and its arrival garnered little controversy. That\u2019s largely because Uber arrived just as the city\u2019s only traditional cab service was winding down operations; Jim Sexton, the owner of the town\u2019s decades-old Yellow Cab Company, had decided to retire, and no new buyer had emerged. But it certainly didn\u2019t hurt Uber\u2019s chances that the city also has a ready-made market for its service: thousands of smartphone-wielding Texas Tech students.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIf Lubbock had a traditional cab service, I would still use Uber,\u201d says Wesley Mitchell, a business-marketing major from Sydney, Australia, who uses the service every couple of weeks, mostly for rides home from bars or parties. \u201cI\u2019ve found that it\u2019s cheaper than a normal cab fare, and Uber drivers are on time and efficient.\u201d Students like Mitchell are a key part of Uber\u2019s expansion plans. Soon after arriving in Lubbock, the service said it would target 22 other college towns across the country, including College Station and Waco.\u00a0<\/p>\n
College students are a natural market for Uber because they\u2019re comfortable with disruptive technologies: they listen to songs on Spotify, cherry-pick the best skits from Saturday Night Live on YouTube, and stay in touch with friends via Instagram. To them, Uber is just another newfangled way of doing things that quickly feels familiar. Unlike traditional cab companies, Uber enables customers to \u201chail\u201d rides on a smartphone app from drivers who use their personal cars. The app allows a customer to track the approach of the vehicle and provides an estimate of the fare before it arrives. The fares are disbursed by a mobile payment system, so no cash changes hands.<\/p>\n
And Lubbock, of all places, was ready to offer a glimpse of this newfangled urban future: a place where cabs, with their garish paint jobs, rooftop status lights, and arcane meters, will have disappeared, replaced by a legion of greige Corollas and sleek Odysseys with top-flight sound systems.<\/p>\n
Or so it seemed. In early November, something funny happened on the way to the future: local couple Ed and Jarita Pascasio made an offer for Yellow Cab, which Sexton accepted. The Pascasios began service a few weeks later, after they passed the city\u2019s application process, which Jarita calls \u201cpretty intensive,\u201d while noting that Uber doesn\u2019t endure the same sort of scrutiny.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But Jarita isn\u2019t donning a yellow shirt and marching on city hall. She\u2019s confident her company can compete. A lot of the city\u2019s elderly and disabled, she says, are still more comfortable with traditional cabs. She\u2019s not giving up on the college students either. \u201cWe\u2019re putting in a new dispatch system,\u201d she says. \u201cIt will have an app similar to Uber, and you\u2019ll be able to book a cab online. It should be competitive.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n
Perhaps. But Mitchell, for one, isn\u2019t likely to change. \u201cI feel more comfortable riding in Uber cars than taxis,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
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Read Next<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last February, after Uber, the app-based ride-sharing company, announced its intention to enter the Houston market, local cab…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":234278,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[90518,168,170,169,89482,840,13961],"class_list":{"0":"post-234277","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-lubbock","8":"tag-january-2015-issue","9":"tag-lubbock","10":"tag-lubbock-headlines","11":"tag-lubbock-news","12":"tag-the-culture","13":"tag-transportation","14":"tag-uber"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=234277"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234277\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/234278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=234277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=234277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=234277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}