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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

A big problem with Uber/Lyft is that drivers take all these fancy calculated positions and plug them into a standard navigation app, which can direct the driver to the completely wrong side of a large block. (Addresses are not very granular in a city.) It’s interesting to me why Uber/Lyft allow this.

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The drivers also blindly follow this app even when the GPS position of the passenger has changed. I used to try and move to the right side of the street to make a pick up easier once I found out which direction the driver was coming from, but I don't bother anymore because the driver is following the nav app exclusively.

There's also the fact that Google Map data is just flat out wrong in many places in the middle of the country, it says my house is my neighbor's house and so on down the block, everyone is off by one.

I have tried to contact Google and get this fixed at least a dozen times over the past decade, always ignored. They used to have a whole community mapping thing where you could submit issues with the map, but those apparently are ignored.

It's a real nightmare trying to convince the insurance company and local government that google is wrong, love how that's my responsibility too.

It's funny, because out of the things that people complain about in modern navigation apps, "showing the right user location" is usually not that high on the list. There are so many other more pressing problems to solve. Map data is often inaccurate, bordering on unusable in less populated areas, and map data providers are colossally slow to update and correct their data. Navigation app UI is still surprisingly bad, even though this has been an area of fierce competition for at least a decade. Geocoding and reverse geocoding is still not perfect, but it's dependent on good map data. Accurate traffic is hard. Routing is pretty much solved but again, dependent on good map and traffic data, so it's perceived as needing improvement. Business search is hard because the underlying data changes so often, and for most nav system vendors, is not their core business so they ship something crappy. Most of these things are not improved by getting slightly better user position, so it's surprising Uber is investing so much into this research.

There's a UK company https://what3words.com/ that's been working on this for a while

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