One would not confuse a single tyre with a full car – a tyre is, after all, but one component of the whole automobile. Much as any modern automobile includes wheels and tyres, a Texxi deployment employs some element of ride hailing by mobile device.
Similarly Texxi is a lot more than simply hailing a cab, something we have included in all our marketing from 2005 onwards.
Texxi is a contraction of Transit Exchange for the XXI Century.
It represents an all new paradigm shift in transportation management and planning, encompassing congestion pricing, social networks and a database of transit intentions.
It is not an easy concept to grasp in one go, drawing as it does from several areas of engineering, banking and finance.
Since at least 2001, there have many many ways to hail a taxi or private vehicle with a phone. The startup Zingo tried this in 2001 and was unsuccessful despite £3 million investment and having thousands of black London cabs signed up mainly because it could not increase the revenue for the operators.
Texxi, on the other hand, was designed from the outset to both increase revenues for operators and decrease the cost for sharing customers – something that can only be achieved through largescale ridesharing – a very tricky area of the transport industry.
When we first made this happen in 2008 on the Isle of Wight, we caused a depression in cab fare prices on the time of Ryde every time we operated with the largest firm, Ryde Taxis.
The plethora of ridehailing startups, some of whom have received tens of millions in financing, will eventually realise this and then licence from us the technology to increase the average vehicle occupancy of their participating vehicles.
All it will take is one cab firm to be able to offer to its customers rides at 25% – 33% of normal cost and the rest will have to follow suit. The usual reaction has been instead to lobby the local Government to outlaw any such attempt at doing this rather than competing fairly to offer customers more choice. Geopolitical and economic realities are bringing to an end that particular avenue of anti-competitive protectionism.
Our patent-pending predates many since granted patents to Facebook, Foursquare, Xerox PARC and Google. We intend to work with any company that wishes to license from us. We will not use our intellectual property to PREVENT people ridesharing. We want it used as much as possible.
