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Comment by symplee | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me, or is it a little disingenuous to write the claim "...improve the accuracy of real time ETAs by up to 50% in places like Berlin, Jakarta, São Paulo, Sydney, Tokyo, and Washington D.C."

When the actual numbers listed for those cities are:

  Berlin - 21%
  Jakarta - 22%
  São Paulo - 23%
  Sydney - 43%
  Tokyo - not listed
  Washington D.C. - 29%

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It gets even more muddled when you consider they mention the following: "While Google Maps’ predictive ETAs have been consistently accurate for over 97% of trips, we worked with the team to minimise the remaining inaccuracies even further - sometimes by more than 50% in cities like Taichung."

Are they essentially saying that they lowered 3% inaccuracy to ~1.5% in Taichung? (And nevermind the fact that 51% is described as "more than 50%"...)

Of course this type of work is fascinating. Getting from 97 to 98.5% accuracy is far far more difficult than getting from 95.5 to 97%. But I don't enjoy the fudging of the perception of results.

It could mean that 97% of the trips had an predictive error of, say, 2 minutes, while the remaining 3% had an error of, say, 10 minutes, and they reduced that error to 5 minutes.

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