Case Study: How Flywheel Modernised San Francisco Taxi Dispatch with FLEET

The Challenge

San Francisco's taxi industry was in crisis. Once a thriving network of independent operators and cooperatives, the city's taxi fleet had been hammered by rideshare competition. Dispatch was fragmented across multiple legacy systems — some still running on hardware from the 1990s. Drivers were leaving. Passengers had stopped calling. The city's taxi medallion, once valued at over $250,000, had collapsed in price.

Flywheel, a San Francisco-based technology company with deep roots in the local taxi industry, saw an opportunity to consolidate and modernise. But they needed a platform that could unify multiple dispatch operations, handle thousands of concurrent bookings, and deliver the kind of real-time experience that passengers now expected from any transport app.

The Solution

Flywheel partnered with FLEET to deploy a unified dispatch and fleet management platform across San Francisco's taxi network. The implementation covered:

Unified Dispatch

Multiple legacy dispatch systems — including radio-based and early-generation CAD systems — were replaced with FLEET's cloud-native dispatch engine. All operators, regardless of their previous technology, now share a single booking pool. This eliminated duplicate coverage, reduced dead-running, and ensured the nearest available vehicle always gets the job.

Driver App

Drivers were equipped with FLEET's mobile driver application, replacing a patchwork of proprietary MDTs (mobile data terminals), aftermarket tablets, and in some cases, paper logs. The app handles job acceptance, navigation, fare metering, and digital payments in a single interface. Critically, driver onboarding was designed to take under 30 minutes — essential when you're migrating hundreds of drivers who are sceptical of yet another technology change.

Passenger Experience

The Flywheel passenger app, powered by FLEET's booking API, delivers real-time ETAs, driver tracking, upfront fare estimates, and in-app payment. The experience is comparable to rideshare — but the vehicle that arrives is a licensed, regulated San Francisco taxi with a professional driver.

Operator Dashboard

Fleet managers access a real-time operations dashboard showing vehicle positions, job status, driver performance metrics, and compliance alerts. The dashboard consolidates what previously required three or four separate systems and a whiteboard.

The Results

Since deploying FLEET, Flywheel has reported significant improvements across key operational metrics:

The fulfilment rate improvement — from 62% to 91% — has been the most impactful. When passengers know their taxi will actually arrive, they book again. That single metric has driven a virtuous cycle of increased demand, more active drivers, and shorter wait times.

Key Takeaways

The Flywheel deployment illustrates several principles that apply to any fleet modernisation project:

• Consolidation beats competition — unifying fragmented operators onto a single platform creates a bigger, more efficient supply pool that benefits everyone
• Driver adoption is the bottleneck — technology that drivers won't use is worthless. The 30-minute onboarding target was non-negotiable and drove every UX decision
• Regulated doesn't mean slow — taxis can match the rideshare experience when the technology is right. Passengers don't care about the regulatory category of the vehicle — they care about ETAs and reliability
• Data changes the conversation — real-time operational data gave Flywheel the evidence to negotiate with the city, attract new drivers, and make the case to passengers that taxis were back

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