NYC taxi industry has been developing Uber-like smartphone app, Arro, with no surge pricing and integrated with taxi screens, plans launch in a couple of weeks
Meet the taxi industry's last, best hope to survive Uber age — New smartphone app Arro lets users hail and pay for yellow and green cab rides.
Context & Ripple Effects
By mid-2015 the yellow-cab industry's answer to ride-hailing was to build its own app rather than wait to be absorbed by one. Arro arrives weeks after neighborhood car services rolled out their own apps to fend off Uber, making it part of a broader licensed-fleet counteroffensive across New York.
What distinguishes Arro is that it works inside the cab as well as outside it — hailing and payment integrated with existing taxi screens — and explicitly rejects the dynamic pricing model that made Uber both profitable and unpopular at peak times.
First-order effects
- Yellow and green cab riders gain an app-based hail-and-pay option with metered fares instead of surge pricing, directly targeting Uber's most complained-about feature.
- Taxi fleets get a digital demand channel without ceding their dispatch or fare-setting to a third party — unlike later arrangements such as Uber listing all ~14K NYC taxis on its own app in 2022.
Second-order effects
- Competing taxi-hailing ventures pile into the same window: Karhoo raises $250M ahead of launches in London, New York and Singapore, betting multi-operator aggregation can beat both Uber and single-city apps like Arro.
- Fare mechanics themselves come under pressure — NYC taxis begin testing GPS-calculated fares to match the flexibility of app-based rivals' pricing.
Third-order effects
- The licensed-taxi industry splits between two structural responses — building independent apps versus renting Uber's distribution — and the eventual Uber-taxi integration deals suggest the independent route struggled to hold riders on its own.
- If no-surge taxi hailing proves viable, it hands regulators and city officials a template for pressuring ride-hail platforms on peak pricing without mandating it.
The trend: Urban taxi industries are moving from resisting ride-hailing software to adopting or partnering with it, with the surviving question being who owns the customer relationship.