In this article I will try to tell how the taxi market is developing and how the development of information technology affects its formation.

Retrospective

It was: The operator sits on the phone, accepts and records applications from customers in a notebook. Then, on a walkie-talkie, interviews drivers for the subject of who will take the order. Many orders were not executed because such an organization of work has its limits in terms of the number of machines simultaneously on the line.

It became: Phones turned into IP telephony gateways with recording of conversations, the notebook turned into an AWP and a server that determines the client’s coordinates at the address and assigns the nearest driver (or shows the order to the nearest drivers and whoever takes it there). Accounting is automatic. Feasibility has increased. Now, with good service, it makes up 80-85% of all received calls.

Will be:People will stop calling a taxi by phone. More precisely, they will stop calling. The call will be carried out by pressing a single button on the mobile. Compare yourself: what’s better, take a minute to get through, explain where you are and then wait another 30 minutes or press a button, after 30 seconds find out that the car will be in 5 minutes and do nothing else? I'm not talking about the fact that if you travel around the country, then you do not really want to remember different numbers.

“No, son, it's fantastic!” you say. And I will say that in some places this already works.

It is clear that for the imminent advent of transport paradise, changes in the current situation are necessary. So what needs to be changed?

"Button"

To call a taxi by button, you must at least make a button. This is a client mobile application. The main objective of the application: to save client time and work as simple as possible. You can do it in very different ways. At a glance, the options are:

Phone book
This is not even a button, but simply a set of phones in the cities. Better than looking for the rooms yourself, but this is where the benefits end. An example implementation of it is Hadnoidea.

There is also a western version of Cab4me . They offer taxi drivers to highlight on the map the area they serve. When the client launches the application, he sees everyone who works in the area. Sometimes the application shows the nearest taxi stand.

Button app
Enter the phone number in the application (register). Press the button, the number and coordinates are sent to the taxi service. Further, everything happens as it is now (they call you back, send SMS, etc.). The disadvantage is that you have been ignorant for a long time about who and when will come to you and whether they will come at all (remember about 85%?). I do not know any living examples. Maybe you should try username ?

Remote Application
Register. Fill out a simple form. More precisely, one “where” field and click “order”. Next, monitor the status of the application. If you want, you will be called back to confirm the order or inform when the car arrives. When ordering, you can choose a taxi class (with it, and the tariff) and specify other preferences.



Such applications with a confirmed number and detailed trip details can be sent to several taxi parks at once or even to the exchange. Theoretically, the chance of execution of such an order increases. In practice, there is still much to be foreseen and done in the application before order fulfillment reaches normal or exceeds it.

Our team made such an attempt and got Teleport . Of course, we still have work to do: we need to connect more parks, add cities, reduce response time and the time of car delivery ... But! We already have regular customers and a certain number of orders daily.

There is also a variation on the topic when, after placing an order, you are offered options to choose from: leave more expensive, but faster or cheaper, but wait. Everything is arranged in the form of a list of offers from different taxi parks.

Russian analogues:

• estaxi.ru (under development),
• taxionline.ru (works),
• InTaxi (in development).
• Yeehay is more likely a stock exchange, but more on that below.

A separate item, nightmare implementations from regional carriers:

• The Java remote control from the taxi is LUCKY - I managed to make an order only on the second day of picking. Can be used as an intelligence test.
• The same convenience version of the taxi from WEST (website down)
• WapTaxi is a Java application. There is no website, but there is a forum. Work two years like.

There are other similar attempts. But some of them do not even start.

Western analogues:

• TaxiPal - reportedly operating in Europe and the USA. In fact, the ordering and tracking scheme only works in some countries. In the rest - the application works like a phone book.
• GetTaxi.com - press the button, then follow the map as the car goes to you.
• Wheely - something related, still in development; makes a person fluent in 4 languages ​​in a team with a committer in Rubinius, and a cool objc developer, a former designer from the studio on the newspaper , the son of the Perm Governor Oleg Chirkunov. Why then fell into the "Western counterparts"? And this is the right question :-)

I think this list is far from complete. The idea of ​​the application for calling a taxi excites many bright minds!

Web application
Why write under different platforms when it is much cheaper to make a site for a mobile browser? Thank God they (browsers) support geolocation functions and even databases on the client. But, as you know, not everything is so wonderful with web applications. Apparently, therefore, there are no analogs corresponding in quality to “native” applications yet. Although, perhaps, just a couple of right comrades have not yet been found ;-)

Increased% order fulfillment and reduced response time

The second problem is increased executability. Formally, it is solved simply: you need a lot of cars. In fact, it is necessary to ensure a balance of drivers and orders in the system at every moment in time, and at every point in space.

It is clear that, based on the law of large numbers, large parks have advantages. But even the largest parks in Moscow "do not take out" everyone. I don’t know for certain what the reason is: lack of machines or imperfection of technology. I think both that and another takes place. The bottom line is that on the basis of these problems there are attempts to solve them by global unification of all. But again, you can combine in different ways ...

Exchanges
Everything is simple. There are order exchanges. Some give orders that they cannot fulfill; others take them and execute them. The commission that the driver gives is cut in approximately equal proportions. Again, for reasons unknown to me, top taxi companies do not take part in the exchange exchange. Perhaps, in order not to spoil your image in the eyes of customers. Or, for example, you manage a park with more than a hundred of your own cars. All cars are fresh E-Class Mercedes. The price segment is premium. Who should I order my client to? Yes, no one, in general. But Logan is not sent there.

Another problem with exchanges is that they are intermediaries and add their own “noise” to the process of technical interaction. Those. in fact, the order needs to go through several gateways, each of which is owned by a separate company and each of which is built and operates on its own principle. After all, there is no single standard!

There are several exchanges in Moscow. In St. Petersburg, everything is average. In other cities, exchange exchange does not actually exist, or I do not know anything about it. (There is no need to confuse exchanges with dispatching offices that have eaten regional taxi fleets and fully control the flow of applications for each.)

By the way, the Open-taxi project, already mentioned on Habré, is also essentially its own exchange, with an order interface for customers of its own production. An example of a successful exchange in Moscow with good software: RBTaxi

Own networks
It turned out that the top taxi fleets are at the same time developers of AWPs for taxi fleets (the exception is Infinity). The reasons are commonplace: paranoia (where everything is ours!) And fear that the base with a real list of applications may fall into the hands of the tax inspectorate (and this is an imminent execution for almost any park). Accordingly, if 100 taxi parks in different cities use your software, then it’s a sin not to unite everyone in a common network and not to exchange applications. Examples are the same: taxionline.ru and estaxi.ru

Again, there are no examples of global dominance of specific software in a particular city. Accordingly, there can be no significant result in increasing% of executability.

In addition, if you’ve already been doing software for corporate clients for about 5 years and are used to the fact that usability in such a large-scale project as AWP is not the most important thing for them (well, that’s what you think), you have to make a serious client application brain refactoring for yourself and your employees. The experience of WEST taxi and taxi LUCK described above (they are also the Leader), this clearly shows.

Equipment for crews, drivers

The way the taxi crew is equipped also affects the speed of application processing. It’s one thing if the car has a taximeter with a navigator, in which there is support for calculating the route taking into account traffic jams. And it’s completely different if it’s an old Nokia with a Java application, where only two “from-where” addresses and a client’s phone number are displayed. There is no need to talk about instant notification of the client about the status of the order and the position of the car.

In addition, different services have different policies: somewhere, the driver can take only the orders he likes, somewhere he is obliged to fulfill all the assignments. The problem is that in this case, the interests of the driver conflict with the interests of the client.

Cost optimization

When there are many costs and imperfections in the business process scheme, you have to either raise prices or sacrifice quality. And this means the existence of a high minimum cost of the order, extra charges for travel from the airport and so on.

Who will win ???

Those sighted at the root and having successfully mastered reading to this place will say: “I understand! We must do everything ourselves, in the form of a service! And the button, and AWP and software \ device for the driver! " Thanks, Cap. The guys from Taxofly are trying to realize this great idea . And also GetTaxi, about which I already wrote above.

But with such a monster-like idea, entering a mature market is very problematic. ETOGES it is necessary to find many drivers at once and many customers at once, and all this simultaneously to start! Here the advantage is already existing developers of workstations. You just need to learn how to make client applications.