Taxi Driver Online

I have helped manage a 40 car system on Autocab classic for last 15 years or so. We are a TOA and each driver has a vote in any major decisions. We have 5 plots in our local area containing about 20k residents. Until recently this worked fine and was a balance between not running too far for next hire when it was busy and not having so many plots that it became complicated where to rank. We have a balance of drivers some older who like to rank on the one plot no matter where they drop and younger drivers who are more eager to look for work anywhere. At a recent meeting the number of plots were discussed, its always an ongoing issue, where when its quiet some drivers are paranoid about not getting there share of work as they see other drivers who know where bookings are about to come out from replot and get more work. Although as management and from a customers point of view this is fine as a toa they have managed to raise enough support to reduce the 5 plots to one big plot while it is quiet. To achieve this (without autocab replotting the map) the controllers have to keep the rank order on paper and jobs are given out manually until there is work on the screen it resorts back to normal. I am not a fan of the single plot as it involves lots more dead miles and customers waiting longer to get picked up. However half our drivers like it, so question is, are there any systems that at a push of a button can treat plots 1-5 for example as the one plot so that we can resort back to the computer auto logging people on and off the plots with gps instead of our controllers having to watch the screen like a hawk for drivers clearing and manually plotting them on a global rank on a piece of paper. If we got the area remapped with less plots when it was busy at weekends we would all be running much further with dead miles.

Auriga can create a 'Manual Plot' that drivers manually plot in to when it is quiet. It is something they wont really have in their literature but they did this with a couple of other firms around the uk.

Using this with a different set of backup scripts ensures it is only used when required.

autocabs ghost will allow you to group the zones together during certain times which will achieve exactly what you want

Yep we do pretty much the same area merging thing and call it night mode but of course it can be turned on at any time and because there’s also a “global” rank permanently displayed on the screen, there’s no need for bits of paper. It’s a one mans meat solution though and personally I’d prefer to use a pulling method that would give the work to the closest or longest waiting car and that way, you don’t have to resort to manual dispatching and the accusations of feeding.

The laws of average tells us that over time everyone on an automated system should get an equal amount of work because the computer isn’t biased in any way. It doesn't matter how fair an operator is, there’s always the chance they leave themselves open accusations even it was quite unintentional. But as for the drivers knowing where the regular jobs are likely to come up, well that’s down to age and experience and something no computer can really do much about.

Bill

Thanks I understand the laws of average but some people always think the grass is greener and seem to be impossible to persuade otherwise. TOAs are complicated you would think that puting a lot of heads into a decision would result in a more sensible answer but apparently not. They went and looked at an Autocab Ghost system today it had 80 plots even the rep couldn't believe that people liked having one huge plot. In Autocab there are a whole lot of settings in the configuration screens that we have never had any manual that explains what each one does, I understand some are to do with data protocalls and other things that we shouldn't mess with but am sure some of them would let us tweak the system to work better for us. Bill with datamaster does it let you configure it in a similar way ?

Yes the system has a control panel that lets you run the system any way that you see fit.

You can have up to 10 different zone configurations, although most companies seldom use more than two (day and night) and each of these modes can link a different set of areas together. Each of these modes can also be configured to work in different ways i.e. nearest, longest waiting etc. I’ll try and get a snapshot of the set up screen later because it’s difficult to try to explain.

Bill

Ive used many systems over the years but this new system i looked at called icabbi blew me away things like combining zones & how to despatch jobs was so easy where u the user has all the control its a system i think a lot of companies will have soon

I think that too many systems are sold to the bosses on the basis that the account system works really well, and few, if any, are sold on the basis of best for the driver.

Auriga being the main one.

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IDFIMH

Your forgetting one thing about icabbi its a cloud based system, if the website goes tits up you have no way seeing what bookings are coming up, as they use a web based booking and dispatch form. The good thing about a hard coded dispatch program, if your connection goes down at least you still have your bookings on the screen. i'm surprised so many people don't think of this, just because its marketed with all the bells and whistles, they don't dell you this if there web server goes bye bye.

Of course this is my 2 cents (or pence)

I think there was the same debate when first ppl moved from pmr to gprs what happens if the network goes down but in time a lot of companies have switched over also yes they do tell you its a cloud based server in time i think a lot of companies will go that way if the likes of skype are on there also a lot of major companies are on the cloud so their back ups are really good but as always there is pros & cons to everything

Labraiz

I think if you stand well back and look at what's needed rather than how thing can be done differently, then cloud based systems have very little to offer to the taxi trade. If everyone’s PCs were so primitive as to make any sort of task near impossible and some kind of hyper PC accessed via the Internet offered a solution then I’d buy into the argument. It’s not that way though because modern PC’s are more than capable of doing the job with one hand tied behind their back, so why rely on someone else’s PC to do the it?

We use a cloud based accounting package, which as a program is pretty good but it costs us money every month and at times goes painfully slow despite us having excellent Internet connectivity. I’d far rather have that same software purchased outright and running locally on our own PCs any day than what we have now.

As for the backup hype, that’s all well and good for the home user that’s scared of loosing their photos if their hard drive fails but there really should be no worry’s with backing up on your own network. We have close to a thousand PCs working out there and in the seventeen years we’ve been running, we’ve never lost anyone’s data, so to me, entrusting this task to another company that could go bust tomorrow seems all a bit bonkers.

Anyway, as Mike says, this one’s down to personal opinions and preferences and this is just my take on it.

Nice to see you back posting btw.

Bill

Why do you need plots when you can Geo locate drivers and reverse geocode pickup addresses to find who is close to the job? Or maybe your system was designed that way? B-)

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LiLo

This is very true. Most o this systems are no focused on drivers. And that's wrong.

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LiLo

That's Ok until, like us as hackneys, you arrive at the rank at, say, number 5, and are the nearest car to the job behind you!!!

I thought things work differently on Taxi Ranks?

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LiLo