Lyft’s plan to take control of its maps and its future
lyft.com
lyft.com
I'm curious to see how good Lyft Maps is, too. Uber Maps is, frankly, a disaster in my area, frequently suggesting illegal and/or impossible turns. I try to submit map feedback every trip (very hard as a rider, as most forms of available feedback seem to be to punish the driver rather than the platform), and it's still never been fixed. Most drivers seem to use Google Maps or Waze instead and if I see a driver using Uber Maps, I need to watch the trip and suggest several corrections. Ironically, I'm only a few miles from the office where most Uber Maps staff used to work.
https://www.gislounge.com/map-traps-intentional-mapping-erro...
In the case of my repeated Uber map correction attempt, I suspect that my correction isn't prioritized because of two factors: first, the turn which Uber Maps suggests, while both illegal and very dangerous, is not impossible (it's an illegal left turn accomplished by making a U-Turn around an island designed to prevent left turns). So, they probably see enough volume of "driver completed route as suggested" data signals to ignore any "but it's illegal and dangerous" complaints, a classic problem with "data driven" systems. And, Uber don't seem to have a real process for riders to submit mapping corrections, only drivers, so my request is unlikely to ever be routed to the correct queue to begin with.
I've added sidewalk vendors to the map with names like "coconut cakes lady," and had them approved instantly.
I've also tried to rename streets, including the news article about the name change, and had them unceremoniously ignored. Same for adding a new bar to the map with a photo of the menu, even though other places I've added have had hundreds of thousands of views.
There doesn't seem to be an underlying system. There's a famous traffic stop in Muine, Vietnam listed as something like "social security office." The photos are all of the traffic stop. The reviews are about the traffic stop. If you run the name on Maps through translate, it comes back "traffic stop." I've tried repeatedly changing the category to "traffic police" and been silently denied.
There's a bar in downtown SF at the wrong address. Comments are about the address being wrong. There's even a photo that says "our address on Maps is wrong." Try to fix it in Maps? Denied.
I took a ride in SF a while ago and it predicted a 3 minute pick up time which turned out to be 25 minutes - no fault of the driver, and the only way I could complain about this was to click through like 4 levels of "other issue" and then jump through hoops sending emails back and forth with support.
The fact that this is opaque to the end user just means we get mad at the workers and not the corporation, classic.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/03/uber-secr...
I'm often on one side of the Bay Area trying to get to the other and had many drivers pull up, then cancel or try to get me to cancel when they see I'm going across the Bay.
> With upfront pay, drivers can now see ride information and what they’ll earn before accepting a ride. Drivers will have access to trip details including the pickup and drop-off locations, estimated time and distance to complete the ride, and a map view of the full ride in addition to the fare.
https://www.lyft.com/blog/posts/upfront-pay-and-the-next-cha...
[0]: I’m sure it would be much more, but I gave up and took the train instead
Airports often have special rules, pickup fees, etc. Drivers don't want to pay an $8 fee just to make a loss on your journey. As soon as you're a few yards out of the airport, none of that applies and a driver will be happy to take you.
are you serious? what airports do you visit where you can do this as a suggestion without laughing. It's like telling the freshmen that there's a pool on the school roof.
even something as small like a Bob Hope in Burbank would be difficult. Most airports do not consider pedestrian traffic to the edge of their properties. I've done it once at that airport because my office was pretty much next door to the Fry's across the street. still made me regret that decision. I'm now in Dallas and even Lovefield pedestrian traffic past getting to the parking area is non-existent. From DFW? Forget it. Much like your suggestion
You won't be able to walk to Downtown Boston, obviously, but Logan Airport is theoretically walkable if you're in East Boston. I'd still take the shuttle bus to the Airport T station where you can do the same walk to the greenway.
You could also take a shuttle to a local hotel or car rental, but that is breaking some rules.
But there is a pedestrian walkway the entire way. With traffic lights at crosswalks and everything.
LAXit is on Sepulveda, but it is safer to cross the street to a parking lot. I'll admit I underestimated the distance. It is closer to 300 yards:
You can also take the SkyTrain for free within Sea Island (which is not well known, I feel) - 2 stops to Templeton, and there are probably plenty of Ubers around there, since there is an outlet mall near that station, or at least a much shorter walk into Richmond.
LAX: walking paths and signalized crosswalks get you all the way to the hotels east of Sepulveda, or take the free shuttle to the cell phone lot and order from there.
SJC: Cross the parking garage to the bike path and from there cross the street. Or just walk down the bike path
ORD, MDW: Free shuttle to the rental car facility, or take the L one stop.
MSN: kind of a long walk, but there are sidewalks the whole way
SLC: take the light rail one stop
PSP: dunno why you’d want to walk in the heat, but it’s a short walk on sidewalks to El Cielo Road
Bear in mind: The minimum wage retail staff that run all the stuff in the airport can’t really afford to pay even economy lot parking rates, so basically every large airport has some kind of public transportation if you know how to look for it.
Even easier to use one of the many taxi cabs waiting at the curb right by the terminal.
edited for spelling
I really hate shelling out $60 for a 20 minute taxi ride, then being expected to shell out an extra $20 on top of that and getting endless grief over wanting to use a credit card to top it all off
I have no idea what the tip expectation of cab drivers are. I tip the same rate I tip for all traditionally tipped services. I don't actually care whether or not that meets their expectations.
I've known a couple of people who never tip cabbies. Nothing bad happens to them.
> I really hate shelling out $60 for a 20 minute taxi ride, then being expected to shell out an extra $20 on top of that and getting endless grief over wanting to use a credit card to top it all off
Drivers actually comment on your tip amount? And they complain about an extremely generous 33% tip?? I wouldn't use that cab company ever again.
The only cab I saw that took cards had a thing that would slide across the front and get an impression of the text embossed on the card. I guess that wouldn't work today since cards aren't embossed anymore
This boils me to no end. Google Maps estimates often make rideshare look like a timesaver compared to transit, but when you add five, ten, even fifteen minutes to the pickup estimate, it really changes things.
Maybe add a cost to accept a ride, which is waived at pickup.
(I don't know how things work)
Sometimes, you'll report a minor issue and get an over-the-top "OMG - WE'RE SO SORRY! HERE'S FREE MONEY AND YOU'LL NEVER BE PAIRED WITH THIS DRIVER AGAIN!"
Other times, you'll report an actual problem, like being charged more than advertised, and they'll do nothing to remediate.
After being charged more than expected on a couple recent rides, I basically stopped using Lyft.
I called the same support number the morning after and the support people were all very accommodating. Called them one more time that afternoon to confirm that our payments were refunded and got the same treatment as the previous night.
This experience is one of the reasons I never use AirBnB for anything anymore. Their support was awful at the exact moment I needed them to offer me any option other than sleeping in our rental car on the beach.
I reported the space being poorly cleaned first thing in the morning (I had arrived at 1 AM). They asked if I preferred a phone call or chat. I didn't want to spend a morning on the phone with them, so I chose chat.
Every 20 minutes for the next few days, I got "Hi, I'm NAME_HERE, and I'm taking over your case!" The names changed, but they never actually _did_ anything beyond "taking over" the case. I felt like I was in a Seinfeld episode.
One of them then decided the best resolution was to tell the host I'd complained about the cleanliness (without including me at all). I started getting nasty messages from the host, who thought I'd happily stayed there for 4 days and then spontaneously opened a complaint. So now on top of sleeping in a gross Airbnb, I was getting constant notifications on my phone of the host calling me all sorts of nasty names.
I opened a _new_ ticket and chose phone support to finally get a hold of somebody. Her accent told me she was in an offshore call center, but she was helpful in getting it resolved. I think they had me book a hotel for the remainder of the days and reimbursed me, or something to that effect.
After I checked out, the host filed a frivolous damages claim against me. I clicked the "not my problem" button and thankfully never heard about it again.
I will never, ever use Airbnb chat support again. Was perhaps the worst customer service experience I've ever had.
Maybe Uber isn’t a company who will care, but most are.
I’m beginning to despise Lyft/Uber as much as the cabs they replaced.
How (and, how respectfully) companies should contribute to OSM is an ongoing debate. But corporate influences are often a good thing, and I think nearly anyone would agree that Lyft's contributions to OSM have been resoundingly helpful.
[0] https://github.com/OSM-DCT-Lyft/US/wiki/OSM-Team-Members
Regardless, it's good to see that they are contributing back to OSM. I agree that overall the use of OSM by anyone "lifts all ships" as long as users continue to contribute back. OSM is one of the most positive projects around lately in terms of taking something that used to be extremely expensive and highly restricted and democratizing it.
And Yes, it's a big investment for Lyft for the open source community.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Jennings%20Anderson/diary...
I agree about how successful OSM has been recently. In an age where Wikipedia for example seems relatively mature, it's fun to see OSM grow at such a pace.
Source - I led this team
Disclaimer: I created the stats and website.
THE IMPOSSIBLE: A "home-grown" mapping system built on OpenStreetMaps?
Lyft seems to really lack any imagination if _that_ was considered impossible.
Then again, Apple Maps started getting sorted out around then too iirc.
And we assume completely coincidentally? Not that Apple Maps, like Google Maps, pulls in data volunteered by the OSM community (both corporate and personal members), packages and improves (sometimes "improves") it, then locks it away behind paid API calls?
In this case and many others, the free and community built project enabled, assisted, or powered the multi-billion dollar tech conglomorate.
I recognize I might sound bitter or dismissive of companies mapping the world and giving it away to consumers for free, but so much is built on openness that so many companies just eat without giving back.
You have that backwards, at least for some companies.
> How Facebook, Apple and Microsoft are contributing to OSM
At the State of the Map conference in Milan, the teams from Microsoft, Apple and Facebook presented their projects, describing how they are working with communities.
https://www.theodi.org/article/how-are-facebook-apple-and-mi...
I've never seen any cite for Google contributing their data to OSM.
Absolutely I do - my overall (and apparently poorly communicated) point was more about Apple pulling in data from OSM to improve their product. They (and others) do contribute back, I only meant it's hardly coincidental that OSM and Apple Maps improved around the same time.
> I've never seen any cite for Google contributing their data to OSM.
This is what I'm so up-in-arms about: people spend so much time adding to Google Maps for free (not even necessarily via OSM), to be locked away behind paid (past a limit) API calls. Perhaps I should have been more explicit in that many companies contribute back, and Google being an outlier in that.
True, but in Apple's case, the massive improvements stemmed from no longer relying solely on data licensed from others, and starting a program back in 2018 to collect their own map data from scratch.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/29/apple-is-rebuilding-maps-f...
Actually, does Google Maps use OSM for anything?
Depends on how you are making the maps. If you're paying someone to trudge around/trace out satellite photos, then yes, its not very imaginative.
If you are using SLAM to generate maps automatically, then thats a different beast entirely. Only a handful of companies were able to do that in 2019, two got bought by meta (who then fucked up the tech, well done zuck) two went bankrupt and one was aquired by lyft.
They could have incubated at least 10 different products during this critical time.
Nothing seems to indicate so far that they're not fine with the situation so it looks like everyone is happy.
Even if Lyft would not give back in some form (spoiler: they do, see https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Lyft), it spreads awareness and drivers will figure out they can fix issues themselves.
That doesn't sound right to me, I'm curious if you have any examples or sources
I guess it's possible though they could just deal with that if they feel like having better maps is a significant competitive advantage, but if the goal is just to not be dependent on Google upstreaming the edits sounds like a better idea.
I think they in the end decided to fork OSM and make it proprietary to keep the data in-house; but I might be wrong. I was not there anymore.
edit: maybe I am wrong. It was Grab, "uber for Asia". They still edit OSM it seems...
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Grab#Grab_Data_Team
edit2: the users seem to be inactive now, so maybe I was right. I don't know.
edit3: when I look at the corporate members, lots of them seem to be taxi companies. I guess it makes sense. I see Gojek, Grab and Bolt.
This isn't the first time I've seen a company contributing back to open source but completely neglecting to mention it in their post about it. It's weird, usually companies love to virtue signal about any tiny thing they do for society.
https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/summary/
> Share-Alike: If you publicly use any adapted version of this database, or works produced from an adapted database, you must also offer that adapted database under the ODbL.
One argument would certainly be: Employees / engineers tend to know much better which projects are worth supporting and/or in need of financial help.
I find this surprising because my personal experience is the exact opposite. At least in NYC, drivers use the Lyft (or Uber) app for managing riders but use a dedicated mapping application for navigating to the destination once you're picked up.
Another open application or another device would not show up in the Lyft analytics.
Uber from the airport regularly surges, usually right after a flight lands, and their surge price puts them well above the price of the taxis that are ready and waiting to pick people up. I’m not even sure why anyone would take an Uber at surge prices - and it’s not like their regular price is that much cheaper than a taxi anyway.
Also, the taxi companies have gradually been getting better at the app game. They’re still a ways off from Uber/Lyft’s usability, but they’re also less likely to be flaky and they never surge.
Maps has been losing money for literally decades. I don't know if they've finally turned that around or not. In some parts of the world, they were still paying a 3rd party per lookup because they didn't own the data.
I also don't know the numbers for their API charges, but I wouldn't be surprised if the totals are mostly symbolic, for VP's to defend themselves as "Hey, look, we're getting all we can out of it!"
Edit:
I'm co-founder and CTO of a heavy haul/oversize routing SaaS called Triple Axle (https://tripleaxle.com). We using OSM and Valhalla.
If you don't mind me asking, how'd you end up in the space? It feels like the vertical has so much esoteric/specific knowledge. We ran into a few companies that were founded by truckers (or by people who had truckers in the family), and it seemed like already having all this knowledge gave them a big leg up.
First, the focus is on savings to Lyft, and not how this innovation benefits customers in any way.
Second, it is highly antagonistic to Google - who is probably still a partner to Lyft in many other aspects (advertising etc). Taking shots at your partners is generally considered bad for business.
It also helps indirectly by giving them control. Google doesn’t do product development well and Maps has been stagnant or even regressing for years. Lyft can always flub it but now they have the incentives lined up where the only party needed to make what Lyft users want is Lyft.
As for Google, they’re a big company and they can take criticism. It’s certainly not like they’re shy about canceling products or changing the terms any time some MBA thinks it’ll help their bonus, and I’d be quite surprised if they didn’t pass on the opportunity to keep a customer multiple times before now.
My issue with the article is just the mind-boggling premise that leveraging an Open Source mapping project is “the impossible” vs using Google Maps. Also, there are lots of other options including of course ESRI.
"And yet, until very recently, Lyft had limited control over that navigation experience, which was built using Google Maps. “For our entire existence, we couldn’t fundamentally change that product,” says director of project management Ben Schrom."
I've worked in the mapping space for more than 20 years and I can tell you one of the biggest annoyances with using third party mapping data is that you are beholden to their cadence and tooling for making updates to the map - you have virtually no control over the data. This is a big reason both Google and Apple built their own map.
The benefit of using OSM is that you are provided decent tooling and a relatively streamlined process for making updates. Map data quality is incredibly important, especially for navigation and it's really hard to manage because the map is always changing - it's not a static thing.
Wasn't it Google that significantly raised their map api price a few years ago that prompted ride sharing apps to pursue open source solutions to replace google maps? Google took the first shot here. Other ride sharing apps are doing this. Grab is another ride sharing app that invest heavily in open street map.
I really want to be wrong.
Lyft doesn't have that?! I though this was a standard feature of taxi apps. Yandex Taxi allows you to call a taxi to a specific pole in the arrivals area at the airport in my city, for example.
This much at least makes strategic sense, with Google continuing to ratchet up intrusive advertising. How long I wonder before we see, say, animated icons for "selected" cell phone stores?
A mapping product like Google/Apple Maps includes a lot more functionality that often gets taken for granted.
For instance: - A geocoding search engine to find places by name, address, or description - navigational directions - tiling and other data distribution (which is both software and hardware) - styling and UI
There is a huge variety of open source options for this functionality, but it's hardly a plug and play thing, and quality varies wildly. Putting it all together is no small feat.
Disclaimer: I work on Headway (https://about.maps.earth) which is trying to make this kind of thing easier.
Ah... the joy of NYC tolls. Even with EZ pass, a ride to JFK from NJ is almost $28 just in toll roundtrip. $37 without EZ pass. $37!!!
Believe me, if I had the choice, I would.
Thankfully, domestic routes are still decent from Newark, though often more expensive than LGA or JFK.
This isn't just about the airport. I visit friends in Queens and spend money there. The toll is exactly the same as going to JFK.
https://mashable.com/article/mapbox-antisemitic-vandalism-sn...
Facebook uses OpenStreetMaps and I'm pretty sure they had to design their own batch processes to validate that area's of interest weren't renamed racial slurs or for Pokimon creatures.
So, yes, you are going to need to make a trade off between potentially more incidents, but faster repair, and less incidents, but being stuck with your current validated release for a while if something goes wrong.
PS: it is OpenStreetMap, no plural "s"
PPS: Meta produces a publicly available validated version of OSM data.
Perhaps the company could better spend their R&D to focus on products that directly imoroves it's market share and revenue.