Three years ago, it was as if the sky was falling for local taxi companies.

Waterloo Taxi, which lamented the approval of Uber as an auxiliary taxi service in Waterloo Region in 2016, has come full circle since then.

“We owe this all to Uber. If Uber never came around, we’d be the same bunch of crappy knuckleheads. We had to change,” said company president Peter Neufeld.

The solution for Waterloo Taxi was their app, Lokal, which was built to compete directly with the popular ride-sharing app. A year after the $20,000 app was launched, Waterloo Taxi is seeing the investment pay off.

The 72-year-old company now has 10,000 of its roughly 50,000 monthly trips — about 20 per cent coming from the app — and that number keeps growing.

“Our goal is to kind of become a hybrid of the two and we’re well on our way,” said Tony Rodrigues, marketing director of Waterloo Taxi.

With an original goal of only 5,000 app trips per month, Waterloo Taxi has doubled that total. With that extra business, the total numbers of trips has increased year-over-year since its launch, from 42,000 in February 2018 to more than 48,000 last month.

With the new app, Waterloo Taxi has also taken steps to modernize the entire fleet of around 100 cars. The cars are all equipped with tablets and a card payment system (with tap technology), and they have done away with the two-way radio of the past.

In places where there were previously direct phone lines to Waterloo Taxi — such as hospitals and grocery stores — they have placed buttons that automatically dispatch the closest available driver, without having to talk to an operator.

With all this change, why stop there? Waterloo Taxi has moved out of the only home it has ever known into a more cosy and parking-rich location at 151 Frosbisher Dr. in north Waterloo.