Neighborhood Car Service Companies Adopt Their Own Apps to Fend Off Uber

The chatty, frenetic dispatch hubs of neighborhood car services are getting quieter.

When the phone rings at High Class Limousine and Car Service in the Bronx, the conversation comes and goes in fleeting bursts as the dispatcher turns not to an old two-way radio but to computer screens that silently blink with color-coded letters and numbers tracking the fleet of cars and their calls.

Somewhere on the road, an app on a driver’s smartphone lights up with an address to go to. A fading corner of the industry lives another day.

Phone calls are fewer and fewer as customers shift to smartphone apps. Popularized by the ride-hailing company Uber, apps are being adopted, if not entirely embraced, by more and more of the local car services that have long been as much a part of city neighborhoods as the local parish or the corner bodega.

High Class began using a smartphone app in December, and since then, a small but growing number of ride requests have been made through it.

“We have to offer this thing or we’re going to be left behind,” said Antonio Cabrera, who co-founded High Class in 1995.