Google Maps will tell if your taxi driver is off course to rack up a higher fare | Hacker News Reader

Google Maps will tell if your taxi driver is off course to rack up a higher fare

bgr.com

36 pointsprotomyth32 comments

Off track according to who's opinion? Likely google maps...

Could it be possible that a local expert knows better than google? Or a competing app?

It's really hard to say if the other route would have been better.

This feature will especially break around special events and construction.

I get the feeling we will see some news stories about folks using this app and getting into an out of control argument with some old timers that drive the roads each day.

Is there ever a discussion inside the big technology companies of what happens when these "anti-fraud" apps are just plain wrong?

I'm even just thinking something as simple as Waze/Uber/Lyft disagree with the route googlemaps chooses

My wife and I can have Waze open at the same time, in the same car, with the same place as the destination and the route will be different.

Doesn't Waze deliberately send people down different routes to A / B test them?

And even without A/B testing, there's obvious user experience reasons to evenly split traffic among alternate routes with about the same travel time.

+1 to A/B test peer comment .

Also because alternate routes have limited capacity I'm sure there's some randomization to avoid thundering herds.

Waze is often better, I do the same thing. GM doesn't seem to account for lights or left turns as well as Waze.

Waze also seems to shape traffic as well.

There are also other times it seems to try to purposefully send me down the worse route. My assumption is that it's to get an analytic of the worse route.

I know my area very well, and can still be significantly off when picking the right route due to unpredictable traffic patterns. Google maps can't even tell me the best route off-peak.

It's fine for travelling abroad when all you want is a route that gets you to where you want to go in reasonable time, but I would never expect Google's directions to be optimal (at least in an urban setting, where taxis are used most).

As someone else has commented, this is definitely a drive to centralise reliance on Google Maps by making it the de facto standard for defining the best route (you can't go back in time to try a different route, so it won't be viable to argue that Google didn't provide the optimum route).

I know my area fairly well enough to be able to roughly figure out what the fair should be and can tell if a taxi driver is fucking around trying to take a longer route. I tend to plan my fairs with a decent tip in mind. If there's any unnecessary deviations from the ideal route, I just subtract the time from whatever tip I was going to leave. It's only happened once or twice and every time it's worked out i've given around the same amount of money I was going to anyway, they just receive no tip out of it. I imagine this strategy would fail in a different city.

Honestly though, 99% of taxis i've ever taken where there's more than one route, the driver usually asks which route i'd like to take. I've never used lyft or uber or any of those so I can't really comment on them.

This strategy could be slightly improved by never tipping.

That would not be an improvement as that directly exposes a perverse incentive.

Yeah, but I call the same taxi place a lot and because I tip, if I get a driver that recognizes me they show up really quickly, i've had them cancel a fare they were on their way to to grab me instead. The way I see it, i've relied on taxi drivers to get me home when i've been in states where i would have been fucked otherwise. I look at them the same as people that handle your food. If i'm getting into someone's car drunk, it's always nice to know the person driving thinks positively of you. I'm also kind of wary of them and try to be polite, i've got a friend who was taken to the railroad tracks and beaten by a group of taxi drivers for being rude.

So, that taxi driver screwed over another person because of your bribe/tip? They might have needed one just as much as you or more don't you think? I think that's exactly what's wrong with tipping culture.

That's why I like how with services like Uber, it's very unlikely to get the same person who drove you previously. No pressure to have to bribe anyone to do their job.

He lives in a place where taxi drivers beat you bloody for being rude. Where ever that is has got a lot more problems to solve before tackling tipping culture.

Heck, if I lived there and were forced to take a cab, I would tip heavily upfront just to protect myself.

For some reason I had brushed over the fact that he mentioned a bunch of taxi drivers just meeting up to kick someone's ass for being rude or whatever that means. That's pretty surreal to imagine.

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/up-to-10-years-in-jail-soug...

A taxi driver in Istanbul took the passenger from Asian side to European side, and then back to Asian side.

Google Maps will deacrease these crimes.

Going from one side of a river (okay, a strait..) to another sounds more dramatic when it separates continents.

It's still pretty dramatic. Compare to, say, a taxi driver going between points in San Francisco going over the Oakland Bay bridge into Oakland, driving around some, and then going back over the bridge back into SF.

Look forward to this app being cancelled in ← 2 years. Perhaps leave taxi drivers alone?

Taxi drivers in the US are generally pretty sensitive to people's perception that they are racking up the fare. If you know a little about the geography they are generally pretty happy to discuss the route and use your preference if you say you'd like to go that way.

if you can learn a little about the streets up front, and use a map application during the ride... just talk to your cabby

maybe someone should pitch the 'human interaction' app, which just completely abstracts all social and retail interaction instead of just chipping away at it bit by bit

In my area, I can consistently beat the GPS by taking all the little shortcuts that I know. What are you going to do when it alerts? Ask the driver to stop and drop you off? Refuse to pay?

And not everyone can "take the optimum" route. It would no longer be optimum. I don't want maximum efficiency to be a proxy for the fastest for me, I'd rather smooth and predicable traffic for everyone.

This weekend I was driving a route I've driven many times before but I use maps to save some time in case of a delay on the road (it's a ~4 hour drive). Google Maps told me to get off the interstate and take a different route through state highways. The issue is is that it told everyone to do this, so this unsuspecting small town exit got a ton of traffic and congestion, defeating the purpose of saving me time.

In reply to the "what about the expert" comments, bear in mind that the alert is when the route deviates by over 500m.

So in urban areas this isn't going to trigger for most cases where it's just a smarter neighbouring road, it'll be where there's a significant deviation.

And this doesn't have to result in arguments: just politely asking the driver about the route seems a fair start

Seems like an aggressive move to get all the taxis to use Google Maps, lest they hear the complaints of their customers.

I certainly know better than Google maps in my area - but I think most Uber and Lyft drivers just follow what their display tells them. If I were a driver I'd be afraid of giving someone the opportunity to complain.

As a parisian, I can only recommend using that when visiting my city!

Lol - as if Google maps was any good at navigating. There is a road next to me that's been closed for nearly 2 years and Google maps keep navigating through it. Keep reporting it over and over again and nothing. Not to mention not having a single clue which roads are one-way or where you can't make a right/left turn. And then paths which are not open to vehicle traffic but hey it's on the map so it must be open to cars, yeah? And then of course any complaint about Google maps is met with "but it's free, what are you expecting!".

I live in a capitol city of a US State and Google Maps is pretty good, I've reported a large amount of changes to streets and stuff in a number of different States, rural and not, and they've almost all gotten published within an hour of me reporting the error.

What region is this in? Would you mind sharing a real-world example?

I've done a lot of navigation around areas that have one way streets without a problem. In one area I drive in the city blocked off intersections at an angle to prevent through-traffic and it's marked appropriately on the map. When a street near my house closed overnight I went in to mark it the next morning and found it had already been changed.

Maybe different areas have differing amounts of attention.

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