Travel This Way! - Get Passengers Picked Up Faster!

Submitted 8 years ago

As an Uber driver and passenger I totally love Uber. The product gets better every day and the developers really are geniuses! The new feature 'pick up rider nearby dropoff' was an amazing idea and has lead to vastly improved customer wait times as well as reduced 'fare seeking time'.

Here's another bit of food for thought attempting to further improve on the benefits that the development above had on Ubers product.

One of the problems I've noticed as a driver (And this impacts Ubers' riders) is that drivers often do not know where to drive to (When fare seeking).

They do not know where they will have the greatest chance of getting a fare. In fact it's total guess work. You can drive to a surge location but this is often a long way away and you'll need to manually use navigation.

Whilst this may not be an issue in all cities; where I live (In Melbourne, Australia) this is an issue as all drivers simply head to the city.

This is highly likely not the most efficient destination for drivers to drive towards in order to increase their chance of finding a fare. Yet the driver knows no more information as they don't know which locations are busy (Will discuss surging later). Thus the driver in Melbourne drives towards the most known location to the best of their knowledge where they can get a fare (Aka the CBD).

It also means as a passenger seeking an Uber in the city the pick-up is very fast. Yet can be much slower in other areas.

So why not look at a solution! There are probably a few ideas out there but here's one:

A proposed solution would be for drivers to be able to turn on something to the effect of ('Suggested drive location') and to be able to navigate there at the click of a button. Uber could purposely spread out drivers across the city (Especially to in demand areas) having the effect of reducing passenger wait times as well as reducing inactive driver time.

As mentioned above some may argue that surge pricing already does this. In fact surge pricing does do this. The issue is it does an okay job but there's room for improvement. What happens if the price isn't surging? What if the driver is ages away from a surge location? What if I don't know how to drive most efficiently to the surge location (Manual Nav entry would be possible yet inefficient.)

In my opinion it really would be as a massive plus to Ubers' passenger service, driver income and may just increase ubers revenue! So why not! :)

Have a good one all!

Ashley Pettit