Taxi Rank is a newly-launched web app that lets folks in Cape Town order cabs online or via smartphones – which isn’t in itself especially new or useful. What is pretty neat is that, once pick-up and drop-off points are specified, the service also provides estimated quotes by Cape Town’s various taxi companies, organized by price.

While the company’s website allows manual pick-up and drop-off input, the mobile site can also determine user’s locations via GPS, streamlining the pick-up time considerably.

Let’s be clear; we like Rikkis. Rikkis is good. But for people wanting to see what the other options are and how much they’d be costing, with as little fuss as possible, Taxi Rank seems crazy useful. This especially given the fact that the app currently only works with fairly established taxi companies operating in Cape Town, like Rikkis or Unicab – although the idea is to add more companies as the service expands.

The service is free to use at the moment, with no apparent mark-up to the quoted prices – which would suggest that the developers are being paid by taxi companies, rather than passengers, for the app referrals. Which, in this instance, isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

[Source: TaxiRank Blog]