London’s Legendary Taxi-Driver Test Puts Up a Fight in the Age of GPS • Hacker News Board

Re: London’s Legendary Taxi-Driver Test Puts Up a Fight in the Age of GPS

#41

Post by chuckcode » Mon, Nov 10, 2014, 10:54 PM UTC

ntoshev wrote: post #12

jes5199 wrote: post #5

GPS routing is awful compared to a person who knows their way around a city. Uber drivers in hilly cities like San Francisco never, ever think to avoid climbing right up and down the steepest hills - the algorithms don't tell them not to, there's no traffic and it's not a low speed limit , it just sucks for other reasons. I had a driver last week who had never heard of Valencia St, and then misunderstood the GPS voic…

It is a trivial problem. Track how anyone with a smartphone and your app on it moves around the city. Aggregate which paths they choose and which turn out to be faster / better. Then propose those paths to other users asking for routing instructions. I work on a software for routing deliveries ( https://www.fleetnavi.com ), and although we don't have this functionality built into the platform yet, it's the first thin…

Does anybody know if Google/Waze/etc. do active A/B testing on routes with drivers?

Re: London’s Legendary Taxi-Driver Test Puts Up a Fight in the Age of GPS

#42

Post by macieka » Mon, Nov 10, 2014, 10:58 PM UTC

Even though in London black cabs are significantly more expensive than uber x, they are a much better experience. I often order an Uber in the pretty busy area of Soho, only to stare at the app for 10 minutes as my driver turns into dead end streets time and time again trying to get to my location. I don't really understand why this is happening, because they usually have both a separate GPS and the uber app that should display driving directions.

Black cab drivers know so much more about the city it's not even a contest. I have almost totally switched to using Hailo in London for that reason.

Re: London’s Legendary Taxi-Driver Test Puts Up a Fight in the Age of GPS

#43

Post by Osmium » Mon, Nov 10, 2014, 11:03 PM UTC

ntoshev wrote: post #12

jes5199 wrote: post #5

GPS routing is awful compared to a person who knows their way around a city. Uber drivers in hilly cities like San Francisco never, ever think to avoid climbing right up and down the steepest hills - the algorithms don't tell them not to, there's no traffic and it's not a low speed limit , it just sucks for other reasons. I had a driver last week who had never heard of Valencia St, and then misunderstood the GPS voic…

It is a trivial problem. Track how anyone with a smartphone and your app on it moves around the city. Aggregate which paths they choose and which turn out to be faster / better. Then propose those paths to other users asking for routing instructions. I work on a software for routing deliveries ( https://www.fleetnavi.com ), and although we don't have this functionality built into the platform yet, it's the first thin…

> It is a trivial problem.

Aren't they all? Until you actually try to do it...

[In seriousness, we are excessively bad at estimating the true difficulty of problems, and making them sound 'easy' when they're not only serves to devalue the work of the people who actually spend the time and effort to actually figure it out.]

Re: London’s Legendary Taxi-Driver Test Puts Up a Fight in the Age of GPS

#44

Post by anomalous » Mon, Nov 10, 2014, 11:03 PM UTC

defen wrote: post #19

ntoshev wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a trivial problem. Track how anyone with a smartphone and your app on it moves around the city. Aggregate which paths they choose and which turn out to be faster / better. Then propose those paths to other users asking for routing instructions. I work on a software for routing deliveries ( https://www.fleetnavi.com ), and although we don't have this functionality built into the platform yet, it's the first thin…

And now all your "fast" routes become slow because all your users are attempting to use them... This is hardly a trivial problem. It might be trivial to deal with a simplified mathematical model of it, but throw people into the mix and it suddenly gets very complicated. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflexivity_%28social_theory%29

Google appears to already take care of the 'fast routes become slow routes due to popularity' issue. Frequently in London, Google Maps will pop up a "Faster Route Detected" alert and will divert onto a quicker path. Sometimes three separate "Faster Route Detected" alerts will pop up during a single commute.

Google Maps would also change my London commute route on a daily basis given the changes in traffic patterns.

Re: London’s Legendary Taxi-Driver Test Puts Up a Fight in the Age of GPS

#45

Post by custardcream » Mon, Nov 10, 2014, 11:05 PM UTC

jedc wrote: post #29

custardcream wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I drive around London a lot during the day time (inside CC zone) and Google Maps is pretty damn good on Android. I did a few years in taxis but owning a car that is CC exempt is cheaper including parking in NCP holes. Part of the reason its cheaper is after some experience driving around the city, you realise that at least half the taxi drivers are taking the piss. "the knowledge" is imminently replaceable by te…

It's not completely replaceable by technology. Once I had gotten a text from my wife as to where to meet her for dinner with friends. She didn't know the restaurant name, and had gotten the street name wrong. I just read the text to my London black cab driver, he asked me: "Did you mean XXX restaurant on [correct street name]?" (Note: there were multiple restaurants on the street). And sure enough, he was 100% correc…

That's probably not "The Knowledge"; that's just some local experience and the fact that it's a high probability someone is going from that precise restaurant quite often. I myself have drunkenly hailed many a taxi outside dodgy restaurants in London. Unlicensed minicabs are pretty good at that too.

Conversely, got a taxi from Angel to Leyton and the idiot went via Poplar and the A13 and the journey cost me £55 for a £30 journey.

Re: London’s Legendary Taxi-Driver Test Puts Up a Fight in the Age of GPS

#46

Post by jdmichal » Mon, Nov 10, 2014, 11:07 PM UTC

jes5199 wrote: post #5

GPS routing is awful compared to a person who knows their way around a city. Uber drivers in hilly cities like San Francisco never, ever think to avoid climbing right up and down the steepest hills - the algorithms don't tell them not to, there's no traffic and it's not a low speed limit , it just sucks for other reasons. I had a driver last week who had never heard of Valencia St, and then misunderstood the GPS voic…

In relation to your comment about the review: If anything less than 5 stars is unsatisfactory in Uber's eyes, why do they even have stars? If the rating is boolean anyway (5-stars or not-5-stars), then just put a single choice: Was this ride satisfactory? It shouldn't be my responsibility to know that rating a driver who was slightly late or slightly lost 4 stars is a Bad Thing. However, if you ask me whether that same ride was satisfactory or not, I'd probably say that it was. I don't necessarily want to punish people for one mistake, but I shouldn't need to rate them perfectly either.

Re: London’s Legendary Taxi-Driver Test Puts Up a Fight in the Age of GPS

#47

Post by custardcream » Mon, Nov 10, 2014, 11:09 PM UTC

crazypyro wrote: post #16

ntoshev wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a trivial problem. Track how anyone with a smartphone and your app on it moves around the city. Aggregate which paths they choose and which turn out to be faster / better. Then propose those paths to other users asking for routing instructions. I work on a software for routing deliveries ( https://www.fleetnavi.com ), and although we don't have this functionality built into the platform yet, it's the first thin…

Tracking, aggregating and analyzing thousands of users with slightly varied destinations, focuses (less traffic, faster, scenic), and signals is not exactly what I'd consider trivial...

It's not a terribly hard job actually. I worked for a startup in 2004 that was doing this with haulage companies. We had 8000 data points moving around the UK coming in via GPRS and 3rd parties, traffic information aggregated and routing and mapping data, pick up corridors and event data.

It was (bar the web front end) a relatively modest sub-30kloc chunk of C++.

Now the scale is different but in 10 years, the problem isn't necessarily much more complicated, just larger.

In fact I think a derivative of it now runs some of Yodel's operations.

Re: London’s Legendary Taxi-Driver Test Puts Up a Fight in the Age of GPS

#48

Post by rbobby » Mon, Nov 10, 2014, 11:16 PM UTC

The "knowledge" is a very valuable skill/infoset. The actual driving and interacting with customers is much less valuable. So maybe the way forward is to separate the two skills.

Folks with the "knowledge" could act as centralized route planners. The can provide many more routes in the time they could drive one (i.e. a single cabby driving might do 1 call every 20 minutes... but could easily do 10 route plans in the same time).

Essentially when someone asks the minicab driver "take me to X", the driver relays this information to a black cab driver at a desk who sends back a custom route. With GPS to identify the starting point and VOIP (via wireless) this could be as easy as a driver using a traditional radio (press the mike button, speak the destination, and viola the route appears on a dash mounted map along with spoken instructions).

Very much like the existing examination question/answer format.

Maybe you would also need to rotate the route planners out as drivers 1 week out of 4 so they keep up with the "knowledge".

Re: London’s Legendary Taxi-Driver Test Puts Up a Fight in the Age of GPS

#49

Post by jedc » Mon, Nov 10, 2014, 11:17 PM UTC

custardcream wrote: post #45

jedc wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not completely replaceable by technology. Once I had gotten a text from my wife as to where to meet her for dinner with friends. She didn't know the restaurant name, and had gotten the street name wrong. I just read the text to my London black cab driver, he asked me: "Did you mean XXX restaurant on [correct street name]?" (Note: there were multiple restaurants on the street). And sure enough, he was 100% correc…

That's probably not "The Knowledge"; that's just some local experience and the fact that it's a high probability someone is going from that precise restaurant quite often. I myself have drunkenly hailed many a taxi outside dodgy restaurants in London. Unlicensed minicabs are pretty good at that too. Conversely, got a taxi from Angel to Leyton and the idiot went via Poplar and the A13 and the journey cost me £55 for a…

Maybe I wasn't clear... I was in a couple miles away at home and told this driver the wrong street (and no restaurant name) and he got me where I needed to go. You might put it down to "local experience" but I think it's better attributed to the knowledge; there's no way a minicab driver would have been able to do the same.

As you rightly point out, it doesn't mean that drivers won't still take the piss, but it definitely limits it. (Particularly when I compare it to virtually any other large city I've traveled to.)

Re: London’s Legendary Taxi-Driver Test Puts Up a Fight in the Age of GPS

#50

Post by ghaff » Mon, Nov 10, 2014, 11:19 PM UTC

jdmichal wrote: post #46

jes5199 wrote: post #5

GPS routing is awful compared to a person who knows their way around a city. Uber drivers in hilly cities like San Francisco never, ever think to avoid climbing right up and down the steepest hills - the algorithms don't tell them not to, there's no traffic and it's not a low speed limit , it just sucks for other reasons. I had a driver last week who had never heard of Valencia St, and then misunderstood the GPS voic…

In relation to your comment about the review: If anything less than 5 stars is unsatisfactory in Uber's eyes, why do they even have stars? If the rating is boolean anyway (5-stars or not-5-stars), then just put a single choice: Was this ride satisfactory? It shouldn't be my responsibility to know that rating a driver who was slightly late or slightly lost 4 stars is a Bad Thing. However, if you ask me whether that sa…

I don't disagree but it seems to be the norm with P2P rating systems on the Internet. I haven't used eBay for ages--at least in its original flea market sense--either buying or selling. But there was definitely a sense back then that even giving a neutral (e.g. problem with shipping but seller resolved or something else along the lines of not ideal, but generally worked out) was giving a major black star. And people zealously guarded their perfect positive ratings--because it did make a difference.

B2C seems a bit different though you still see more 5s than deserved. Personally, I have no problem giving 4s for good to very good, but not truly outstanding.