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

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

#81

Post by superuser2 »

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?

What does "truly special service" even mean for an Uber ride? Breaking traffic laws for you? Being especially friendly? Owning a very expensive car?

There are a lot of ways in which a ride can be unsatisfactory (smelly, creepy, crappy car, poor driving, loud music, etc.) but not that many in which it can be exceptional. Unless they show up in a Tesla Roadster or something.

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

#82

Post by peteretep »

justincormack wrote: post #17
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…

It is honour. Have had free trips because they didn't know a street in eg Swiss Cottage. It encourages repeat business.

25% of cab drivers had no clue where Gaskin St was, and I never had any suggest they were going to knock off the fare in three years...

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

#83

Post by jarek »

w1ntermute wrote: post #14
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…

You're making the common mistake of disregarding disruptive innovation[0] at its early stages. Just because it starts out as only of low quality[1] doesn't mean that it will stay that way, or for long. 0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_innovation 1: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8e/Disruptiv...

You're making the common mistake of regarding high quality technology as inevitable. Just because it starts out as only of low quality[0] doesn't mean that it will improve, or fast.

Google Maps directions is pretty disruptive tech, right? Add 10 years of experience, lots of roads, lots of time to gather data, real-time traffic info, and when I ask it for directions from my current location in inner London to a place in central London[1] it still gives driving directions first, even though I switch to transit, walking, or cycling everytime.

But hey, innovation.

0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clueless 1: http://i.imgur.com/c7XAuUm.png

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

#84

Post by _pmf_ »

piggity wrote: post #80
chrisseaton wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Ah, but then a user might throw an Internet Fit(tm) and cause a public outcry about ratings being manipulated by Uber etc. etc.

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

#85

Post by Natsu »

bsg75 wrote: post #69
jdmichal wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Its not just Uber, I often get "reminded" of an upcoming quality survey where anything less than perfect is equivalent to a tragedy. I believe this is yet another case of managers using data without actually taking the time to understand the domain, or use it to identify problems and develop solutions. The approach seems to be nothing more than a facade of customer service.

In my mind, the question should be "was your service acceptable (yes/no)" followed by a comment box where you could leave anything worth noting. I guess you might have to sort comments via humans, but then you'd actually know what was going on as well. I suspect relatively few people leave comments as well, but what they did tell you would likely be a lot more than silly star ratings.

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

#86

Post by Havoc »

guelo wrote: post #20
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> GPS routing is awful compared to a person who knows their way around a city. Strongly disagreed. GPS has traffic information, a human driver does not.

A human that drives the same roads everyday most definitely does have traffic information.

Not the kind that matter though: Is there an accident & associated traffic jam today on road X or not.

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

#87

Post by custardcream »

mattmanser wrote: post #57
custardcream wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 proble…

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.

Well the dataset is about the same size now, perhaps 10% larger. The individual problem to solve is easily distributed across a large cluster of systems.

30kloc of COM/IDL as well that is. The actual routing engine was about 12kloc and the rest was the object model and deserializers. The routing engine was built on a two week binge of Red Bull, TAOCP and some papers printed out.

It really wasn't rocket science even though we charged them like it was.

From scratch by a non red bull enhanced team using c# instead it would probably about 3 months' work for two people to reproduce.

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

#88

Post by jeffwass »

syllogism wrote: post #73
jeffwass wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are there any skills you have, degrees you've completed,or knowledge you possess that you wouldn't also consider a party trick?

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

#89

Post by disordinary »

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…

This is one of those weird cultural things that us non North Americans cannot understand, like automatically tipping. Here we don't tip unless someone is absolutely exceptional (and tips get shared amongst staff in restaurants anyway), and we don't give five stars unless you really deserve it.

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

#90

Post by noselasd »

Havoc wrote: post #86
guelo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A human that drives the same roads everyday most definitely does have traffic information.

Not the kind that matter though: Is there an accident & associated traffic jam today on road X or not.

A cab driver will get that information too.
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