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Comment by mayank | Hacker News Reader

> Who cares about knowledge of city streets?

Funny story: for a while in SF, the taxi union (?) was running ads that were thinly veiled attacks on Uber/Lyft. One of them showed a smiling taxi driver with the caption "would you rather have a driver who knows the city by heart or by GPS?" I found it particularly hilarious because the answer, for me at least, is GPS with live traffic information. Just another example of how out of touch the taxi companies are.

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GPS still doesn't beat a good driver 9 out of 10 times for city driving. Uber drives consistently miss exits, head down clearly mistaken paths created by GPS errors, sit there staring at the GPS rather than the road

I uber to work everyday and 90% of the time the uber driver blindly follows GPS through an alley that isn't really meant for traffic, ignoring the much simpler and faster route that whatever GPS uber uses can't figure out.

But it's cheaper, cleaner, and will show up on demand. But the navigation of the driver is the big positive for cabs.

I'm not going to contest your experience because my experience with uber in the city was for tourism/getting home after a night of partying, not work. In my experience uber drivers took my word over the GPS every single time when I gave directions. I know that the driver can affect my rating like I can theirs so its in all our best interest to have a good ride.

>> "drivers took my word over the GPS every single time when I gave directions"

So wouldn't a driver knowledgable of the city streets that you don't ever have to give directions to be better?

I use Uber all the time but I find that regular taxi drivers are better in traffic as they tend to know ways around it the GPS doesn't provide. I also regularly get GPS focussed drivers taking 1 turn too early and driving in a circle to get back to where they started to make the correct turn (twice this week already). I still prefer Uber overall but dismissal of street knowledge because GPS is 'better/more accurate' doesn't gel with my experience at all.

It'll be super funny when self-driving cars are seen following the at-times-ridiculous GPS directions. For the foreseeable future, I wouldn't want to be in a car without a steering wheel.

Haha, apparently you are being downvoted for being a realist. (Oh, fun, me too. Looks like I need to drink some kool-ade.)

You're not being downvoted, the comment is, because it doesn't contribute to the discussion.

You know how in Google maps you can drag and modify routes and it'd modify the route? Id imagine self driving cars will support that.

self driving cars that we still have to drive, sounds awesome

GPS directions are only ever ridiculous due to a lack of information. In many cities (Sydney Australia, for example) data is good enough and the roads straightforward enough that chosen routes are always either ideal or sufficiently close to ideal.

You're assuming that the driver will use their knowledge of the city's streets to save your time and money, instead of to make them more profit.

You Uber to work every day? Isn't that terribly expensive?

Not really, I lyft to work often and its $5 each way door to door.

I'm in Chicago and it's about an $8 cost per trip on average to go from one part of the city to another. The subway system is about $2.50 for the same trip but it's not on demand.

If you only care about cost in a big city there are likely less expensive options but if time is more valuable to you then cost isn't the big concern.

If I'm by myself in Chicago the CTA is the way to go. But once you get to two people, not taking an uber is just silly.

I'm only 4 miles, so the trip costs about 9 bucks each way. I don't have a second car and even if I did, my office charges 300 (pre tax so really less) to park. And if I'm forced to stay late, I can expense the ride home. So I'm pretty sure it's cheaper than driving myself.

But I could do public transit for around 2.50 each way. But adding about 15-20 minutes transit time.

What I really should do is bike to work. It's better for my health, wallet, and environment. I really have no excuse.

I bike commute 8-9 months of the year, but currently am ubering both ways during this wet El Niño winter we are having as I live without a car.

I estimate my Ubers this year will work out to around

($20/day for uber * ~60 winter work days) = $1200

Most people with modest vehicles will see a total cost of car ownership costing them somewhere in the $5-10k/year range. So I could double or triple my already heavy reliance on uber and come out ahead.

TLDR: For those with short commutes, a heavily uber-assisted bike commuting plan is a huge financial win. And this is not even considering the downstream value of the productivity and health benefits resulting from regular exercise. Or the value of the time I can now spend reading instead of driving.

I'm assuming you're in the SF Bay Area -- there have only been a handful of days when I've had to break out the rain gear so far this season (today was one of them). Maybe 5 days max.

If a person is willing to bike to work when it's dry in the morning (even if it might rain on the way home) there's probably only around 20 - 30 days when they'd need Uber, so that'd cut the Uber expenses by 1/3 to 1/2.

Totally. I'm the first to admit that I'm a lazy bike commuter and with a little grit could greatly reduce my commute costs.

The point I was trying to illustrate for anyone reading is that uber is cheap, not expensive, when used to obviate the need for private vehicle ownership.

Might still be cheaper than owning a car.

Uber Pool is like $6 from Union Station to my office, no tip. I rarely have to put up with another person and many drivers don't even seem to realize they are supposed to wait for one.

not the person you were asking, but that would really depend. It costs $18 to take the caltrain both ways from San Jose, and I could see uber being cheaper if he both lives and works in Santa Clara, for example.

Why would you compare a Caltrain fare from SJ to SF to an Uber ride within Santa Clara (especially when there's only one Caltrain station within Santa Clara's city limits, so it's unlikely that he'd take Caltrain if he were staying in Santa Clara)

It would cost $60 - $80 for a one-way Uber trip from San Jose to SF, Caltrain would be around $16/day with a discounted 8-ride ticket, around $10.50 per day if you use a Caltrain monthly pass.

Even if you put 4 passengers in the car, it'd still cost you $35/day for Uber.

No, my point was that riding Uber to work can be cheaper than public transport depending on where he lived). I think he gave a clearer answer as a reply.

I drive to work every day (suburb to heart of dc), and a good majority of cars in front of me "driving distracted" are often Uber or Lyft (more than cell phone talk/text or applying make up type of drivers).

It's just frustrating to see these drivers driving so distracted (I think they are more distracted before picking up a passanger)

I absolutely agree. This is compounded if you take UberPOOL because the driver is expected to follow the GPS route (for multiple pick ups to work).

If you give me a clean car, reliability, and a driver who knows the city, I'd gladly get a taxi even if it's maybe 15 to 20% more.

I'm confounded as to how these uber drivers who either live in the city, or drive through it every day, don't know the city. How does that even happen?

From what I can tell, the vast majority of SF Uber drivers don't live in SF, and to make matters worse, most seem to have only been driving for Uber for a matter of months. Routes and traffic patterns are actually more complicated than you might expect, and it can take quite a while to figure it all out.

I've had Google maps tell me to go the wrong way down a one way street. Two different times! You gotta be paying attention to where the GPS is telling you to go. Knowing the roads in invaluable for a driver. That being said I've had many cabbies who had no idea where they were going.

To this day Google/Waze will suggest I get onto the 101's Octavia entrance by just driving down market and turning right onto the 101, neglecting the very longstanding rule that you have to run the Octavia St gauntlet to get on the 101's Octavia route.

If you report data errors, Google is pretty good about fixing them quickly.

I reported a huge problem in Google Maps for years and it wasn't fixed. A bunch of POIs for downtown Seattle were transposed to downtown Kirkland. Search for directions from Microsoft campus to the Seattle Federal Building and it would send you to a residential area off 85th west of 405 in Kirkland.

(I reported it multiple times over the years)

This sort of problem won't apply for driverless cars though, as they must honor road signage. The first time your one-way street is encountered by a driverless car, the discrepancy between map and reality will be identified and corrected.

"GPS still doesn't beat a good driver 9 out of 10 times for city driving."

Most of your data points are from a single route (your daily commute) and this may not be representative for all trips, even within your city.

I live in a city with significant variation in traffic patterns from day to day, and GPS with traffic info performs much better than someone who knows the roads.

My own experience is just the opposite--I've never had a problem with Uber but have had plenty of problems with taxis. Just yesterday coming home from the airport the taxi driver got off the highway in the wrong neighborhood, ignored my verbal directions three separate times, and when he finally got to my house refused to get out and help me with my luggage.

Uber's directions are poor. Tell your driver to use Waze. Or use it yourself and tell your driver where to go.

Problem solved.

In my experience, many veteran taxi drivers simply take (sometimes longer or more congested) routes, just because they are used to them and think they are better. In some cases, I've noticed the difference of a fare as much as 30%. I always have a hard time explaining them that other route is shorter, because they know better (than me or GPS). For this reason, I now first call taxi firms that use GPS on all cars.

The "union" here in Australia has been running campaigns too, sometimes with hilarious results [0].

0:http://www.smh.com.au/national/my-cab-driver-fell-asleep-tax... (warning, autoplay video)

I can appreciate both sides of this. There are lots of times that uber's maps will ignore an alley that would prevent having to circle the block, or will try to send a driver on the highway for one exit when going between 4th and 9th, which is a horrible idea.

There's a particular brand of driving that feels like "Only barely keeping it together because of the GPS" that's a little uncomfortable.

A confident driver with some slick shortcuts can be a really fun experience.

You can probably buy GPS data for travel between any two given locations that will indicate the most popular routes and how long they took - from cellphone companies, Google and the like? Do driver routing companies (deliveries, taxis and such) do this to discover implied optimal routes?

In theory this is possible. In practice, it's clearly not commonly done as Apple, Google, etc. will merrily send you into notorious traffic jams, unprotected turns against heavy traffic, etc. even in major cities will millions of users.

It seems like Google might be getting slightly better now that they're pulling in Waze but I have seen little reason to believe that this is at all widespread.

I once called a taxi (not in US), the operator said it will arrive in 5 minutes. About 20 minutes pass, and I get a call from the operator saying that the driver can't find my street and asks me if I can walk a few minutes to one of the larger, more well known streets.

So after 10 more minutes the driver finally finds me on a street corner and I enter the car - the GPS device (which would have guided him right to my doorstep) is installed but shut down and unused. I ask the driver why he didn't use the GPS, and he manages to tell me with a straight face that he doesn't need it because he knows all the streets in town.

I was literally left speechless for the entire ride.

Counter-point: once in Chicago a n00b Uber driver who didn't speak much English drove onto the bridge that had "Under Construction" signs, construction equipment and those orange barrels all over the place. Only my frantic yelling from the back convinced him to disregard GPS and go "custom route".

In London I actually find the opposite. I like Uber and the convenience, but all the drivers are foreign and don't know their way around. More than 3 times I've been taken a hugely longer way round because the driver blindly followed the terrible Uber GPS, literally adding 15-20 minutes to the journey for no reason. Sure, I can get some of the cash back (and it is super easy to do so) but I would like for them just to take the right damn turning the first time.

Also they have to use the Uber GPS and not Google Maps, which several drivers have told me is quite inferior.

London taxi drivers are a massive outlier, though. They are world famous for their knowledge and expertise. It's not really relevant to compare them to anything outside London.

Drivers can use any GPS they want. The uber gps is Apple maps.

Whenever I've used Uber, it seemed to be Google Maps.

I have had a SF cab driver input the wrong address in GPS and start driving the entirely wrong direction, so it is pretty good to have a driver that knows the city. Hilariously though, this clueless driver wasn't a Uber/Lyft driver, but a traditional taxi cab driver!

The problem there is that the driver had to manually input the address. With Uber/Lyft, that problem doesn't exist, because you input the address into your phone's app, and that's relayed to the driver's phone and automatically used to route them. Any time you have humans entering data, you're bound to have problems like this.

> you input the address into your phone's app

> ...

> Any time you have humans entering data, you're bound to have problems like this

So no matter what there will be problems like this?

I don't know about you, but I know my home address just fine, and have no trouble entering it in (in fact, the Uber app probably lets you save it as a "favorite"). I don't expect some random Joe to be able to enter in my home address error-free.

Now, if you don't know your own home address better than some random driver, then you have problems.

> The problem there is that the driver had to manually input the address. With Uber/Lyft, that problem doesn't exist, because you input the address into your phone's app, and that's relayed to the driver's phone and automatically used to route them.

That doesn't work if you use the mobile site, m.uber.com, rather than the app. That site doesn't even offer the option to enter a destination.

(I use the mobile site because unlike the app, it doesn't ask for a pile of invasive permissions.)

To be fair I would say it was perhaps less being out of touch and more about being desperate to try to say anything for differentiation. But either way your point is the same. And for those that say "well I'd take a local driver over a GPS driven experience that might go wrong with bad data" I would ask; are you're old enough to remember having vastly different fares when you took a cab to and from the airport on a business trip? Never have to worry about that when you know a GPS system is doing the driving.

In my experience in SF, all Uber drivers who use the nav built into the Uber app fail at this. They never know which roads tend to be choked with traffic during different parts of the day, and it's rare to end up with a driver who actually knows the city well.

Drivers who use Waze (still a minority, it seems) tend to do much better.

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