Taxi Driver Online

look fella you may live on a perfect planet where bosses admit mistakes and change thinks. but i live on this one.
your clever booking system isnt clever.
i will say no more to you.
but if someone asks on here for views on evocab. i will give them mine.
and you can give them yours.

Ok, easy tiger. I'm not saying don't make comments, all I am saying is that when you make comments which someone else takes the time to try and help you with, you accept the comments, and try to get something changed. You are right, managers are the last to admit when something is not quite right, but they sit in their ivory towers, not at the ground level where you do.

If enough people at ground level give the same CONSTRUCTIVE feedback, eventually the message will stick. If not, then there won't be much of a company left, when all the drivers are gone. Just think - you will still have a job, they may not. What do you have to lose?

Finally, rest assured I am just an evocab user who has taken the time to learn as much about the system as possible. I'm trying to help anyone asking questions/making comments - nothing more. This is a forum after all.

ok fair enough.
but why do you think it takes three weeks (slight exag) for a no show to register?

Mr Cgull.......tell me more.

When you say it does not register, where is that? Is it that ou cannot mark the job as a no job, or is it that you do the No Job fine, but the office does not seem to know about it when you ask them about it?

it goes through three or four stages to be put back on.
and thats if the office dont call you to confirm.
whereas in the past it took seconds.

i still cant work out the point of this clever dispatch.
if its quiet then it not worth having. as customers get their cars in good time.
if its busy then the delay in sending out the jobs means cars can be further away from the job than when it came in.
when its busy cars are flying.
a 15 second dealy means a car could be much nearer another job than the job that they are being classed as near. the same for the other cars.
it all sounds great when the saleman tell the offices.
but its pointless.

Cgull my old freind, our system regarding no jobs works in the following way, you press your no job button, you are placed automaticaly to the bottom of the q in the area the job is. the operator will then either transfer you to the top or queiry the job with you.
As you know all our drivers have a open invitation to go into our office and look at and ask questions about our operating procedures. Change only happens if people take the time to change thngs.

Now that’s interesting. I’ve just run through the Evo demonstration and as far as I can see the intelligent auto dispatching seems to be pretty much the same as ours i.e. points, distance, zoning etc. Now I’m not trying to score points here but if we have been running for several years without major complaints, what all this fuss is about?

I think the problem is that the more intelligence you build into the system, the harder it is to identify why a certain car got a job or why one job went out before another. We do get occasional calls to say that a job went out wrong but when we do a detailed post mortem examination of job log; inevitably, the computer has followed the exact rules that the customer set up.

The most common driver accusation is how can the system be right if a car ends up driving past a waiting customer? From a driver’s point of view, they just want to pick up the nearest customer but the owner doesn’t want his best account customer kept waiting. Two conflicting sets of requirements for the computer to have to deal with and all it can do is to follow a set of rules. Evo are dead right though when they say that dispatching wholly on a nearest car basis just doesn’t work.

Perhaps if the system was designed to allow drivers to bung the PC a couple of meg of ram each week it may do a better job.

Bill

Don't think anyone is claiming that it it is.

My argument is this, a system that claims to be the cleverest most intelligent despatch system, should be able to choose the nearest available car in the zone the job is in if the operator wants to make that decision.

With Cordic I can choose whether to use 1st car or nearest car in any particular zone for any one hour of any day of the week.

Now that is intelligent.

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Tom

As far as I know, all systems allow for a dispatcher to override the auto dispatch mechanism when need be and providing the fact gets recorded, it shouldn't be a problem.

I say that a good operator is always going to be better than an automated system simply because the computer can't possibly know everything (unlike operators ). But constantly overriding the computer can lead to accusations of cheating which destroys one of the key arguments for automation.

All in all, I reckon that the benefits of any automated system far outweigh the shortcomings and you have to balance these odd instances where you feel it gets it wrong against the majority of the time where it gets it right.

Bill

Tom

Sorry missed the point slightly there.

I don’t know the Cordic system at all so I’m not in a position to draw any direct comparisons. By all accounts both are very good systems and I suspect that both allow a degree of override capability. If this isn’t the case with Evo then I’d be extremely surprised.

Bill

Bill

Who mentioned overiding the system. I am talking configurability.

Each zone has the option of choosing first car or nearest car and this can be configured so it uses one or the other for any hour of any given day.

So for any particular zone I can use first car on sundays, closest car on Mondays, first car between 08.00 and 09.00 on tuesday and closest the rest of the day etc.

Cordic can't overide auto despatch! Something that scared the poop out of me at first.

But now a controller is thinking 10, 15, 60, 120 minutes in advance. Seeingwho is going where and pre-allocating if appropriate.

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Tom

Ah so as the China man said!

So there’s no override capability? Scary! So what happens when one of the drivers ex wives rings up for a cab and the operator can see the job will end up going to him? Or a minibus is being sent for Mrs Jones who can’t get into one. These are all instances that an intelligent system can be programmed to deal with but more often the info is in the controller’s head rather than the machine.

I understand now what your saying about the nearest car option on day/time slots and if you find it works well for you then that’s fine. The old saying about one mans meat is another mans poison springs to mind there but as long as you have the choice to make the system work as you want it rather than just how a software engineer thinks you want it then no problem. Seems odd though, giving that degree of control flexibility while not providing a basic override.

The problem with all systems comes down to the fact that they only work as well as the information that they contain and unless someone takes the time to set the thing up correctly then the “intelligence” is limited. We go to great lengths to build in bells and whistles then get miffed off when customers can’t even be bothered setting up the basics.

Wouldn’t it be nice if all taxi companies worked the same way and options weren’t an option.

Right That's me off for the weekend and a test drive in the new Alpha

Bill

Bill

Lots and lots of ways to deal with that scenario.

A job can be put 'on hold' which means it waits to be manually despatched , so guess that is an overide.

You can set up an attribute called 'not brian'? or whatever the drivers name is, and then set that attribute against the relevant phone numbers.

It is all bog standard stuff.

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