While Uber is still by far the biggest private taxi app in New York City, its competitors are making rapid gains in the market.
Lyft, Juno, and Gett are all climbing just at a time when Uber is vulnerable, beset by a series of separate scandals involving harassment allegations, workplace culture, unflattering video footage, and surreptitious masking programs.
According to data from the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC), Lyft, Juno, and Via, at the end of January, were all at the highest number of trips-per-day they’ve ever been. (Gett has seen a slight decline since December.) TLC data for the month of February, when Uber has most suffered from scandal, isn’t yet available.
Uber launched in New York back in 2011. Lyft and Gett both launched in New York in 2014; Via (which offers only carpooling, not solo rides) launched in 2015; Juno just launched in New York (and is still only operating in New York) in May 2016.
Look at the chart below that uses public TLC daily-ride data (collected by Todd Schneider, an engineer at annotation company Genius). Juno, especially, has seen hockey-stick growth since May, climbing from fewer than 1,000 trips per day to 23,700 at the end of January.
And Juno has enjoyed that growth without any paid marketing; it’s all been word-of-mouth. Juno CEO Talmon Marco believes that’s proof that the taxi-app market, crowded though it may be, still has ample room to compete.
“Look, it’s not easy to build a ride-sharing company,” Marco tells Yahoo Finance. “There are a lot of upfront costs and complexities—frankly, far more than we thought when we started the company. But at the same time, it’s still early. The fact that we were able to capture market share right away in the most competitive market in the world is a testament to that.”
Juno offers new customers 30% off for the first month of use, and the receipt it sends after a ride tells you precisely how much more money your driver made through Juno than they would have made on “a competitor.” (Gee, which competitor might they mean?)
On one recent ride from Brooklyn into Manhattan, a Juno driver who also drives for Uber, and did not wish to be named, said he makes more money per ride with Juno, but more money overall from Uber because of the higher volume of ride orders.
The driver, when asked about Uber’s recent issues, said, “There’s a very nice saying: ‘When you go up, say hello to everybody, so that when you go back down, someone will give you a hand.’ This guy [Uber CEO Travis Kalanick] is too rude. I hope his investors realize and take their business somewhere else.”