Edit: who are a long-running minicab service who give fixed price bids, have a reasonable app, have their own fleet by dedicated drivers, and are usually price competitive with Uber.
In many ways they are much worse. Their own corporate policies and their CEO encouraged drivers to use bus lanes, to ignore cycle super highways (to drive on them), to ignore all parking and stopping restrictions - if fines were issued the company paid for them to encourage drivers to carry on doing so in protest of not having the same access as black cabs (who in return for their training and being regulated to be accessible, etc are granted access to bus lanes and other stopping locations to ensure that accessibility can be fulfilled).
They also fell foul of using drivers without performing full background checks, etc. And their drivers are reasonably famed for not knowing where they are going (at least Uber technology saves their drivers from needing to know anything about London).
tl;dr No. Google Maps is as-good as the knowledge or better.
Hailo allegedly did a piece of research to try and prove that black cabs were better than a private hire vehicle using Google Maps as Hailo had both at the time and had the data to compare.
The point of this was to enable a marketing campaign to sell Hailo for hailing black cabs because bus lane access and the knowledge meant that black cabs would be faster, etc.
But in reality, all they discovered was that for 99% of the time Google Maps was as good as, if not better than, the black cab.
Only in certain parts of London, at the worst of a rush hour or around some sporting event that has fouled up an area... does the black cab come out better by a small fraction, for a short window of time.
Google Maps is for all intents and purposes on par with a black cab and the knowledge.
That might be true for a taxi use case where few trips are the same but for regular routes knowledge still wins because you only need to have the software tell you to go a dumb way once to know that's not the best way to that place.
One thing to note is that Addison Lee minicabs are notorious for their dangerous driving and ability to get away with injuring people. Especially cyclists.
This measure of protection is not afforded to uber drivers, nor are they encouraged to drive illegally by their company.
IMO Royal Mail are the worst drivers, far worse than any cabs.
I sometimes see them racing one another in large lorries, especially around Mount Pleasant. The fact that they have such large vehicles, while also driving unfamiliar routes (i.e. turning down roads that most traffic doesn't) makes them worse.
I'd hate to fall foul of confirmation bias here, but as someone who regularly drives in London, some of the worst driving I've witnessed has been by Addison Lee cabs.
I ordered an Addison Lee to the airport a few months back. The driver spent the entire time chatting about Uber and how dangerous it is. It's like they get off on it. He was also being quite racist about their drivers. This was at 3am in the morning.
This is just one data point, but I wasn't impressed.
No excuse for asshat drivers, but I've had an almost identical experience with Black Cab drivers too, and plenty of issues with Uber drivers around the world.
Edit: who are a long-running minicab service who give fixed price bids, have a reasonable app, have their own fleet by dedicated drivers, and are usually price competitive with Uber.