Taxi technology with a heart
I hopped into a taxi this morning to get to work in the pouring rain. After tumbling over my wet self trying to fit through the Toyota’s door with laptop bag, umbrella, while wrapped in a business suit, I noticed that there was a nice new touch-screen panel sitting right above the meter.
I happen to take taxis quite often so I know a new system when I see one.
After I told him my destination, the cabbie happily typed it in with an on-screen keyboard with his index finger one letter at a time. Curious to why he needed to enter the destination, I leaned forward and asked unsuspectingly “is that new?”
The cabbie gave me a gentle smile and said yes, and went on to give me the demo. After only typing in a partial string of characters, he moved his finger to the “Search” button and clicked it. The program paused for about 3 seconds and then gave a list of possible destinations which had the partial string as a prefix. Right on the top of the list was Shaw Tower. My destination.
The cabbie had a bit of difficulty hitting the one thin line which displayed “Shaw Tower” and tried to stab the screen with his pen (eeks!). It worked. Immediately a map came up with a bull’s eye on my office building. How cool is that?
Unfortunately it isn’t one of those full-blown GPS systems that talk to you while you drive and tracks the car as it moves, but still it was a good alternative to the printed Street Directory. The cabbie explained to me that he had to go through a 5 hour training to learn how to use the system, but was actually delighted by the fact that he didn’t need to flip a book for a destination he didn’t know.
His elation extended beyond the touch-screen to the backend where he explained that now there’s a system that helps rather than hinders. He goes on to explain that taxis with this new system installed also have a GPS on board where a central computer knows each taxi’s exact location. This has enabled Comfort Delgro to come up with a killer app for the shift changing dilemma.
The cabbie explained that he heads to Jurong when it comes time to change shift, the new system will know this and prioritise all bookings to Jurong for him (even though he isn’t the nearest taxi to the pickup) so as to minimise wastage of his long trip up.
I thought that was a terribly considerate idea and a lovely one for cabbies. It is so easy for an organisation of this size to simply dump in default fleet management technologies into the cabs and hope for the best, but someone there obviously put him or herself into the shoes of the cabbie and has come up with a killer app.
Most of my friends say they talk to cab drivers about politics; I talked to them about technology and it made my day. =)
Filed under: Uncategorized
Wow….. it looks like you are a true blue techie at heart, even to the point of talking to cabbies about tech stuff!
For me, the only rule with taxis is simple - “Be there!” ala the book Fish! Otherwise, as you would have imagined, I would probably be cursing “What the Fish!”