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

tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com

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

#71

Post by chrisseaton »

sushid wrote: post #63
chrisseaton wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm... are you supposed to rate 5-stars for acceptable service? I've been rating 3 by default - then plus or minus depending on extraordinary things.

Yes, very much so. Have you seen the drivers' ratings? They usually hover around 4.8-5.0. If you're rated below 4.7 for both Lyft and Uber, I believe you're either on 'probation' or removed from their service. You accidentally rating someone 3 for an average service can actually cost them their job. I'm hoping their algorithm uses some sort of a weighted average to offset the ratings of individuals such as yourself w…

Well I didn't accidentally rate them a 3 - I picked a median score for standard service. I don't remember being told to do anything else when I signed up. If you rate 5 by default where do you go for truly special service?

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

#72

Post by schrodinger »

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…

Side note: it drives me nuts that that article mixes up "insures" and "ensures." Shouldn't an editor at someplace like Forbes catch that?

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

#73

Post by syllogism »

jeffwass wrote: post #58
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…

Wow, you're really calling a course of study that usually takes 3-4 years to complete a "party trick" because it's replaceable by technology? By that reasoning, isn't any job any of us have on this forum also replaceable by sufficient technology? Anyway, back on topic, "the knowledge" also covers alternative routes for road closures. I've usually been pretty impressed by black cabs. They know obscure little streets o…

> Wow, you're really calling a course of study that usually takes 3-4 years to complete a "party trick" because it's replaceable by technology?

Yes of course!! Some other party tricks include reciting hours of lyric poetry from memory, adding large numbers in your head quickly, etc.

You're talking like the world is fair or something. There's not necessarily an equivalence between effort expended and value created.

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

#75

Post by rahimnathwani »

nwp90 wrote: post #74

A lot of people seem to miss the point that the Knowledge also acts as a deterrent to bad behaviour by proper cabbies - they have too much invested in their license to be likely to throw it away lightly.

It's not about how much they have invested; this is a sunk cost. One cannot change the past. It's about the future revenue they would forego if they were to lose their licence.

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

#76

Post by rahimnathwani »

goatforce5 wrote: post #10

Several times I had London cabbies stop the fare meter when I showed them (the same) short cut near where I lived. "No, don't go to the lights, turn down this lane!". All of them had their brains explode that there was a better way that saved about 200 meters and 30 seconds of travel. I'm not sure if there's an (unwritten?) rule that you get the rest of the fare for free if they're taking you a long way, but there wa…

Does google maps know this route?

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

#77

Post by stevenbedrick »

Retric wrote: post #64
mattmanser wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

30kloc is not a trivial problem, that's a year's worth of programming. I also love this: the problem isn't necessarily much more complicated, just larger If a programmer ever said this to me, it'd be a massive red flag that the estimate they're about to give me is going to be very wrong.

It's a larger data-set not a more complex problem. Also, there is no need to get a perfect solution anything better than what's out there is useful.

> It's a larger data-set not a more complex problem.

Ummmm... yeah, scaling the kinds of algorithms that one might apply to this sort of problem up to larger data sets is often extremely difficult.

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

#78

Post by dwd »

foldr wrote: post #61
divegeek wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, and GPS navigation can have real-time traffic information while a cabbie can at best make an educated guess. What's _really_ valuable, though, isn't real-time traffic information, but future traffic information. What matters isn't the traffic right now, but the traffic as it will be when you arrive at a given portion of the journey. I suspect that at present cabbies have the edge there, but that edge will also…

My point was that a cabbie doesn't have to guess if the GPS can provide the info. There's no rule saying that black cab drivers aren't allowed to use technology when it's useful.

A driver would actually be listening to the two-way radio fitted in the taxi to stay informed of traffic conditions and incidents; in real-time and with far more information to plan alternate routes.

Sometimes the existing technology is still better.

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

#79

Post by danieltillett »

anomalous wrote: post #44
defen wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have often thought the applications like Maps should randomise the suggested routes (within reason) to spread the traffic load around and improve things for everyone.

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

#80

Post by piggity »

chrisseaton wrote: post #71
sushid wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, very much so. Have you seen the drivers' ratings? They usually hover around 4.8-5.0. If you're rated below 4.7 for both Lyft and Uber, I believe you're either on 'probation' or removed from their service. You accidentally rating someone 3 for an average service can actually cost them their job. I'm hoping their algorithm uses some sort of a weighted average to offset the ratings of individuals such as yourself w…

Well I didn't accidentally rate them a 3 - I picked a median score for standard service. I don't remember being told to do anything else when I signed up. If you rate 5 by default where do you go for truly special service?

Shouldn't it be the service's responsibility to determine what you are rating as a median score and then recalibrate your scores to their drivers?

i.e. If I always rate 3, but sometimes rate 1; then that might be similar to someone always rating 5 but sometimes rating 1-3.

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