Humans would error correct - if there are too many uber drivers in the area already new drivers would drop the ride request. I think if you managed to remove all humans from that process you'd be able to get some truly bizarre scenarios.
I humbly propose that if you have perfect agents, picking up 5 people with 3 cars is an incredibly simple problem.
It's only difficult because Uber has to deal with humans - will their cell phone be charged? Will they hear the notification on their phones? What if they forgot to indicate that they've taken the rest of the day off? What if they claim to be available but are actually in the restroom at a fast food restaurant? It's supposed to be a 6 minute drive but what if they make a wrong turn? What if they glance quickly at the map of where they're supposed to go but saw it wrong, then muted the turn-by-turn so they could blast some daft punk? Working with human agents is hard.
If you have always-online self-driving cars, then you've already done the hard part. Directing them where to go is trivial.
Right, but what would the UX look like for that? You're suddenly selecting multiple options, filtering based on your criteria, then having to reselect when there's not enough drivers that meet your criteria, etc. etc.
Part of the beauty of the uber experience is that (at least from a UX perspective), it's very very frictionless. You make two, maybe three selections and hit go, and you the car arrives.
And who knows how long that will take? In some places it takes long enough just to request a single uber trip much less two in a row. Imagine how livid you'd get when a half hour after you first intended to leave the bar, the second self driving car arrives, and it to is soiled.
It would be interesting indeed if uber was somehow specifically prohibited from penalizing drivers for rejecting rides. That and the ability to set notifications when rates reached some preferred threshold that they were interested in. Everyone could set a reasonable threshold and hold off until it was met.
During a fare, an uber driver told me that when he goes to an area with lots of drivers, he will turn off his app for a minute or so to artificially decrease the number of drivers in the area. If this is practiced by multiple drivers repeatedly, the result can cause a surge. He told me that he does this, and, that he holds training sessions where he teaches this practice to other drivers, among other things. I do not know if this was actually effective or if it still is.
I don't see any evidence that Uber is intended to work that way. Drivers don't get to filter riders to only get riders who are going somewhere near to where the driver wants to go. They have to take whoever is nearby, and can only reject a small percentage of requests before they are kicked out of Uber.
Yeah; that's ultimately why Uber treats driver quality as a short term problem and they don't do a lot more pre-employment checks... it's a problem they'll fix by removing the drivers entirely; so better to sweep it under the rug and by the time they get in trouble, it will be too late...
And perhaps Uber has some heuristics (ancient English for AI) or competitor intelligence to detect if a driver has accepted a Lyft ride. Uber can then offer a carrot to that driver to get them to cancel the Lyft ride. They could offer the best fare that turns up in the next 2 minutes. Costs Uber little, causes three damages to Lyft (Lyft lost profit, annoyed Lyft customer, driver happier with Uber).
I could get on board with that, theoretically. In reality, how do you define history of cancellation. This thread has popped up at least some evidence that indicates that people show up in the system as cancelling rides for reasons that are not legitimate. Driver screws around and then cancels, claiming the user wasn't in the right place. User's phone dies, etc.
Your idea would be easier to make happen in reality if reality weren't so messy.
You can mandate large contiguous sections of time on your service and punish drivers who reject rides during that time. A driver who is driving a passenger for Lyft obviously can't pick up a passenger for Uber.
When i was in florida at Orlando, my wife and i experienced several of the worst Uber/Lyft drivers i can imagine. We're talking regularly breaking the law while driving, drivers. My wife also regularly encounters drivers she is uncomfortable around.
In general i'd vastly prefer a non-human experience.
Except the drivers can reject trips. Uber can just choose not to use them for future assignments, e.g what they're doing with suspending accounts for rejecting too many rides.
They're basically saying they don't want to work with unreliable contractors.
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