Uber signs with Yellow Cab SF and Flywheel Technologies to bring all of San Francisco's 1,075 taxis to its app in the coming months, after a similar deal in NYC
Carolyn Said / San Francisco Chronicle :
Context & Ripple Effects
This deal closes a decade-long arc: Yellow Cab, once San Francisco's largest taxi company edging toward bankruptcy under pressure from Uber and Lyft, now supplies its fleet to the rival that helped break it. The structure follows the template Uber set two weeks earlier in New York, where it agreed to list all ~14K city taxis at fares matching Uber X.
Flywheel is the connective tissue — the firm born when DeSoto rebranded under a co-marketing agreement with an e-hailing app back in 2015, and a natural partner given Uber's stated push since 2018 to fold bikes, transit, and rentals into one app.
First-order effects
- San Francisco riders get 1,075 more vehicles inside the Uber app within months, and Yellow Cab SF plus Flywheel gain demand they could not generate alone after years of losing riders to rideshare.
Second-order effects
- Lyft faces the same choice Uber just made twice: list taxi fleets itself or watch supply consolidate around its larger rival, with the NYC precedent making taxi-company partnerships easier to replicate city by city.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the taxi/rideshare split dissolves into licensed-fleet marketplaces where medallion holders become app suppliers rather than competitors — reversing the disruption dynamic that drove Yellow Cab toward bankruptcy in 2016.
The trend: Rideshare platforms are absorbing regulated taxi fleets as inventory rather than fighting them, with Uber's NYC-then-SF sequence setting a replicable playbook.