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 voice and accidently got on the freeway, getting us stuck in cross-bay traffic for 20 minutes just trying to get to the next exit. Of course I rated that ride 5 stars, because I'm not actually a psychopath ( http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2014/08/14/what-ar... )
It's going to be a long, long time before we put anything approaching the depth of information that years of experience brings into our algorithmic routing systems. And startups are structurally disincentivized from trying to, anyway.
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.
I just came across this in watching an enjoyable LISA presentation by Elizabeth Zwicky. At http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=C4r... is a story about customer feedback for a company which has, broadly speaking, engineers and admins.
"Engineers do not give out 5s. If you tell an engineer that the possible rating scale is 1 to 5 and they like you, they give you a 4. Because tomorrow they might love you and then they would give you a 5. They probably won't, but they might, so they give you a 4 so that they have room. We all are totally okay with this. But the world is also full of this other class of people who if they like you give you a 5. They're quite consistent about it. 'I like you. I see nothing wrong with that. I'm giving you a 5.'"
The graph (with, admittedly, artificial data meant to portray an example) at http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=C4r... shows it most clearly, with the satisfaction numbers from engineering clearly trending down. Apparently, engineers don't like to fill out forms, while admins do, so satisfaction survey results also have a sample bias in favor of the 5s of admin staff.
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 who consistently rate very low.
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.
There's no way to easily verify how companies are actually calculatign the displayed ratings, and I doubt the average user would care or be savvy enough to find out. I assume it's a given most services see the input ratings as a personal indicator modulated by how reliable/benevolant/... each user is. Reddit votes, for example, are fairly nonlinear and visibility priority is even more complicated.
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.
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.
One argument for the resolution is a perception as to whether the ride is improving or not - a binary indication of this will only tell you that you've gotten to the best ride, whereas a scale will, over the course of time, show improvement or detriment (subject to the different standards of the rider). Also, one person's "satisfactory" might not be another's, so having a range to select from will provide a much richer piece of feedback capable of being weighted than a simple yes/no.
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 thing to do when we get volume.
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.]
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...
Tracking, aggregating and analyzing thousands of packets with varied destinations, priorities and signals isn't trivial either, but it's something that some people and businesses have become very good at.
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.
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.
Waze claims to do something like and it produces the most retardedly slow routes ever. I just hate it when someone uses Waze on my Lyft because I just know I'll take 10 minutes more.
I don't think it's as trivial because there are lots of things to consider. Some drivers are just SLOW and it will have nothing to do with traffic. Maybe all slow/terrible drivers use your app so all the route speed information is completely based on specific patterns set by your app.
That is odd in my experience. Perhaps it has to do with my locale.
I am in a major metropolis and I drive throughout the city, suburbs and adjacent cities regularly. I know the area and I have been driving for decades.
I have been using Waze for about a year now. The navigation routes it selects appear to be very good. They appear to be based on relevant factors too. I can only guess what variables they include in their calculation, such as weighted capacity, current traffic speed, etc. of the relevant route elements.
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.
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 technology and is merely a party trick IMHO.
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% correct.
That's the day I learned to really respect drivers with The Knowledge.
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.
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.)
But that's illogical. If you know the bar and restaurant scene in London, it's very volatile. Restaurants and bars change names at an incredible rate. "The knowledge" will have expired by the time you've learned it.
It's certainly a large scale problem, but a smaller problem than learning all the points of interest in the first place ... no one is saying it's easy ...
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 on the opposite side of town. Rarely have to give instructions. Compared to NYC where cabbies ask me how to get somewhere.
> you realise that at least half the taxi drivers are taking the piss
This is really not the case with my London cab experience. These guys are super professional. In many other cities I've found cabs taking the scenic route but never with black cabs. I feel your 'half' claim extremely inflated off probably what was very few bad experiences.
San Francisco's hills are a very localized issue. Most cities are pretty flat. London included.
Of course it's just a matter of time until GPS programs integrate topographical awareness, and give you the ability to avoid steep climbs.
Its also just a matter of time until cars provide visual aids for navigation, and not just the voice on a GPS device.
I think you're being a bit dismissive. Hills are just one example - every city has its local issues, be they hills, rivers, different laws, traffic patterns...
Rivers are irrelevant to a GPS. Rivers only matter to a car to the extent that they determine the road layout, and GPSs know the road layout. They're also pretty good about laws, although there is still some trickiness about things like left-turn prohibitions that are only in effect at certain times. It's getting better all the time, though. Their traffic data is in my experience better than human estimation at this point, since they can route based on actual current conditions rather than extrapolations from past experience.
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.
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.
> the mode of transit shown by default in Google Maps has absolutely nothing to do with quality.
Of course not. Technology will eat the world and improve on and replace humans in all complex cases. Like deciding what mode of transport to use in central London. Because disruption.
>Of course I rated that ride 5 stars, because I'm not actually a psychopath
You are doing everyone except the driver a disservice. By failing to give low ratings to bad drivers, you are precluding good drivers from entering the market (because the bad ones will never get phased out, and they will saturate the market). You are also preventing consumers from making a well-informed decision, which limits the effectiveness of market mechanisms.
That's a very insightful article you linked. I had always wondered why Airbnb reviews were so uniformly high, even when not merited. I'd found some explanations involving Airbnb hiding negative reviews, but never quite connected the fact that I personally felt uncomfortable leaving negative reviews with the fact that other people generally didn't.
They let users crowd-source their own directions, along with much better turn-by-turn descriptions too. Eg, "turn sharp right just after the firehouse, go past the field and make a left just before the baseball field". Instead of "turn right, keep left and turn left".
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.
That's really interesting. I wonder if there's scope and technology for a collaborative constraint-based solver that finds more effective routing for cities.
I always use GPS even on the roads I use almost daily because the traffic information my GPS provides (Google Maps) works much better than me guessing what the traffic will be. Even if I know that traffic will be slow in the morning on certain roads, I cannot predict accidents and construction work.
No he won't. This guy just spent 4 YEARS memorizing maps...his honour is not going to allow him to rock a GPS and any radio'd info isn't going to include the same second-by-second route computations that the GPS does.
I've been in San Francisco for 3 years, and I still check traffic information every weekend. Community events, which are fairly common, can make the difference between "traffic will be fine" and "don't dare leave your apartment."
Perhaps less anecdotally, local traffic is a major staple of local news radio and TV, which probably means it's important even for locals.
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 be swept away by predictive algorithms incorporating knowledge of typical traffic patterns plus lots of inputs about events that may affect traffic.
The latter point is particularly interesting if a navigation system acquires enough scale that it is directing a substantial fraction of the traffic. In that case, it knows not only what external events may affect traffic, but can further make decisions to control the flow, distributing and smoothing.
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.
Happens all the time, especially when there are big events on. I had a driver a few weeks ago who had come down from Sacramento to work the weekend in SF for such an event (Dreamforce, I think) and was relying solely on GPS.
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 was no resentment from them. All of them were incredulous there was a better way to do it.
(Just looked at Streetview. There's nothing special about that lane that should make it a big secret. I guess it must have been No Entry/One Way/something and changed recently before my journeys.)
As I said, the route seemed really obvious to me. It was a quicker way to get from Kingsland Rd to Hackney Rd, so it was two major roads in central London.
The short cut involved taking a narrow laneway, and i'm guessing something about that lane changed meaning it had only just become accessible.
I also had cabbies turn off the meter late at night. I'd light up a cigarette (back when that was allowed), they'd ask if I cared if they lit up too, and once a guy said "Ahhh, I was heading your way anyway" and he turned off the meter. I lived in East London surrounded by cab drivers, so maybe they were being neighbourly.
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".
Here in Brooklyn car services seem to have lost the ability to navigate the city in just a few years. You used to be able to call a car service, have a car show up in 5 minutes, and they'd get there with just the cross streets.
Now most often the first question is "what's the address so I can put it into my GPS", even with metered cabs. I've been yelled at for asking to take routes that the GPS doesn't suggest, even though I know at 3pm on a Tuesday we shouldn't be on the BQE. Or there's construction on Flatbush and we should go around it.
I don't think we need a test quite like London's, but basic knowledge of neighborhoods and major intersections should be required. At least until we get those self driving cars that can optimize routes in real time.
There are more people than ever in Brooklyn and they are more affluent demanding cabs around an otherwise poorly navigable borough. Some days, weekends and inclement weather, they can't keep up with demand and it takes forever to get a goddamn cab. Also New Yorkers have a "just want" attitude and would rather have rude, un-knowledgeable cabbies than less cabbies.
And who cares if the cabbie doesn't like you. It's your right to demand an exact route as long as you're staying in the city. Tell him you're calling 311 and don't tip.
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.
You could probably sell it to the Knowledge Boys & Girls cramming for the test - they wouldn't have to log so many hours on the road putting wear & tear on their rented vehicles trying to cram for the test. They can run around for as long as they can stay awake without ever leaving the comfort of their home. Plug it into something like Occulus rift or some VR environment... and if they hit traffic, they can kill that mission and start again, finding a better route instead of in being stuck in the very tiresome reality of sitting in traffic for 40 minutes by taking a wrong turn.
The main problem I see with that is detail and the age of your data.
Drawing from experience trying to memorize a journey through the city of Bale, which whilst less large than London is quite winding and certainly suffers from the same compounding of historical and modern buildings. Going through my route, spots where i stopped to take in more details are very much more tangible in my mind. The wide park circled by a walkway where I stopped for a short break is quite vivid in my memory, and I can pull dozens and dozens of points from it. The path along the viaduktstraße leading up to it is far more faint in my memory, considering I only remember the Paulskirche and one of the bridges towards it. Considering only something akin to Google Streetview would be practical, there seems to be just to few points your mind can latch onto to create a detailed image of the location. In addition to that, your other senses do play a significant role in remembering locations.
Also, cab drivers need to know very recent information you're tempted to overlook designing a game like that. How fast does traffic go at this time of day at this location? Are they setting up construction over here? It's often not even realized consciously, but rather factors into decisions on a lower level, turning into the "hunch" you have about a certain route or even more generally a certain course of action.
So unless there is a way to have a perfect representation of the city that is also less than a day or two old, it's not really a replacement for actually going through those streets.
Does the test check the best way, or only knowledge of finding Some route? I could see someone learning the city topology with VR, and then using experience to learn congestion patterns.
I thought the coolest fact about the Knowledge is that it actually induces observable physical changes in brain anatomy.
> She has discovered that the posterior hippocampus, the area of the brain known to be important for memory, is bigger in London taxi drivers than in most people, and that a successful Knowledge candidate’s posterior hippocampus enlarges as he progresses through the test.
It seems that, like most things, there might be a tradeoff involved. According to this paper[0],
> However, they were significantly worse at forming and retaining new associations involving visual information. We consider possible reasons for this decreased performance including the reduced grey matter volume in the anterior hippocampus of taxi drivers...
I would take a London taxi for the same reason that I'd read a paper book, for the experience, not for the result. The Knowledge is such a wonderful anachronism, and I hope that it can co-exist in some form with new services such as Uber and Lyft, but outside of protectionism I can't see any reason why it should - technology is nearly good enough now to replace it, and in some cases probably better. If it does continue to exist I can't imagine that market for people with the Knowledge will be enough to support the number of London taxi's that are on the streets now.
Most of the black cab I have taken have a also a GPS, so that's not like it is an exclusive type choice, and I wonder why people assume so. Even connected GPS are fairly bad at finding the shortest way if it means running in the other direction for a while and that happens quite often in London and Black Cab driver are quite good at making those kind of info just looking at their gps traffic info.
The knowledge is a very useful tool, and in any city, a driver with good local knowledge is what you are looking for, regardless the middleman you use. Technology is only making the trade off of using amateur bearable, and in reality the real value of Uber and others is from the rest of the service provided.
A bit like in your example - if you had to go to the bookstore to load a new book on your reader and it could only hold one book at a time, the technological superiority of even the latest generation of kindle would not make them go pass novelty items. Real value of ebook comes from the rest of the services you get from it and that's the reason why even with the shit reading experience, the first gen kindle was a success.
The anachronism here is the segregation between black cab and minicab in London and the services the legal restrictions on the services they can offer. Although, IMO, that is not nearly as bad in London as people on HN experience in other places in the world. Black cab are meant to hailed on the street, now, without booking, review or other overhead by drunk people and tourists. Some licensing restriction to make sure you get a basic level of service in those circumstances is probably acceptable. If you have time to plan a bit in advance, there is Uber and plenty of competitors that have always been freed from the restrictions.
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.
London Black cabs are overpriced, and there's no market check that stabilises price, as much as I respect the institution of "The Knowledge", you are still bound by the need to trust your driver, and many are just opportunistic.
The Knowledge may make for better navigation, but as a customer, the amount of times it actually comes in useful (road works, accident, awkward route) is very low, 90% of journeys are straightforward.
It certainly doesn't justify the 50%-100% price increase for the privilege of hailing the cab on the street vs. by pre-booking, especially when most of the time the route you are taking is short (no Londoner in their right mind would use a black cab for a long journey, unless they have money to squander or it's so late at night that you're desperate)
The likelihood of getting any real value out of the knowledge when taking a cab in London is very low, and the fact I need to pay for idling in traffic with an un-capped fare potential on top of jacked rates just makes for a terrible proposition.
As a consumer, there's just no value in that, and Black Cabs need to evolve or compete themselves back into relevance, bring on Uber, Lyft, Wheel and any other newcomers.
I'm a fan of the 3 yes/no question survey. It doesn't take much longer than rating 1-5 unless you want to add comments.
Would you use our service again?
Was there anything we could have done better? (+comment)
Would you recommend us to your friends and family?
Also, let's not forget how people sometimes lose their ability to be objective when they're upset which may manifest itself in the form of a less than 5 star rating for a driver that made 1 small error or said something innocuous that we took offense to.
Having lived for some time in Beijing, where a "black cab" is a slang term for an unmetered private cab or metered cabs running with the meter off, reading the part of the article detailing "black cab advocacy" and "black cab protests" turned into more of a mental challenge than I would like to admit.
As automatics routing software takes into account the extra information of traffic history with real time existing traffic conditions computers will do just as well or better than "The Knowledge Boys". Currently local experience with traffic is very useful, but as that information becomes available electronically and much more comprehensively the playing field will tilt even more to automated analysis. UPS already uses their combined driving history to save millions of man hours and millions of tanks of gas[1]. I have to imagine that Google and others can do even better with all of us implicitly telling routes and existing traffic conditions. Be interesting to know if Google is doing a/b testing with their routes in maps like they do with their website UI.
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 voice and accidently got on the freeway, getting us stuck in cross-bay traffic for 20 minutes just trying to get to the next exit. Of course I rated that ride 5 stars, because I'm not actually a psychopath ( http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2014/08/14/what-ar... )
It's going to be a long, long time before we put anything approaching the depth of information that years of experience brings into our algorithmic routing systems. And startups are structurally disincentivized from trying to, anyway.