Taxi Driver Online

FFS don't let them go, staff like that are a rarity indeed.

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IDFIMH

I think you are right with this one. It would be good to have the flexibility of both. From my point of view, it would be nice to be able to use 'longest waiting car' in the smaller 'town' zones, but then use 'closest car' for the larger 'further out' zones.

That is exactly how I configure it ITK.

Then we have the middle land, the medium size zones just out of town. In the week I have them on first car, at the weekend when we are busy I have them set up for closest car.

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A member of the Hire or Reward Industry

and then we have the set up thats the same throughout the area.

This 'closest car' or 'longest waiting' car choice by zone, is probably something worth passing back to auriga then.

Now what I would love to see is a major change to back up zones.

With Cordic you have the option to nominate back up zones where a car will be pulled from if no car is free is the actual zone.

So lets say we have a zone A and it has two neighbours, Zone B and Zone C.

We have to decide whether B or C is the 1st call off zone. There is no flexibility within the zone. So a job might be very close to zone C but if I had chosen Zone B it will pull from B first.

What I want is an equal group of back up zones. When a job is up for considered for calling off from an outside zone the system should workout the nearest in all the 'back up' zones and send that car.

Can't be that difficult to do.

We never pull 'out' from the centre, only 'in' from the outside of our area. If a car is pulled out then it has to be a controllers decision. Admittedly our job count is low, so it is not onerous.

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A member of the Hire or Reward Industry

Tom

What you describe there is our default pulling method. The areas nominated to pull cars from are all searched and then nearest car is used. Even though this seems to be the most logical way of doing things, we do have users who prefer to use the simple straight list method like yours. The reason they give for this is that in the event of a dispute, it's easier to check and explain to the drivers. Take a look at this link http://p214.ezboard.com/fdatamaster2093frm11.showMessage?topicID=4.topic . A simple but extreemly effective change we made recently to the pulling list.

Bill

So Bill just to confirm.

With Datamaster it works like this;

Job in Zone A. No car is free there.

Call off zones are B and C. Both have cars free in that zone.

The system then decides which of the free cars, in either of the zones is closest to the pick up!

If there are more than one job waiting it will decide who gets what, how?

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A member of the Hire or Reward Industry

Tom

That's exactly right. The calculations are not rocket science and no sweat for a modern PC even if there were fifty or so cars in the pulling zones. The only issues seem to occur when the system finds a cluster of vehicles on say a rank where they all appear equidistant. In this instance, it tends to take the last car, which sometimes gets complaints as they have generally been waiting the shortest period of time.

Not a big issue really seeing as pulling cars off the back of the rank is normally an option that most use.

Bill

I think you meant

an option that most DON'T use.

Thanks for that.

So any Cordic developers who read this site; Datamaster does something your system doesn't - at the moment

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A member of the Hire or Reward Industry

You could be right there Tom, we only provide the tick boxes for the options, we don’t keep records of how companies use their system. Pulling from the back of the rank though is something that hackney companies often ask for. The logic being that if a car has sat for half an hour and is now first off, they don’t want to be pulled any distance when their quite likely to have someone walk up to them. Good for the hack but less so for the PH driver.

The important thing to remember is that providing software isn’t a contest of features. It’s interesting to have a debate like this and make comparisons but rest assured I’m not going to rush off to make changes just because another supplier has a feature that I’ve never been asked to include. Our software works the way it does because we provide only what people ask for rather than what we think is best and that way you don’t need to be a brain surgeon to maintain it. Mind you, if you think about it, we had a much better start on our software than most others, having spent years working with most the other software suppliers as the main data provider. This gave us the opportunity to look at others in detail and to find out what customers like and dislike.

Getting back to pulling though; If your system doesn’t allow manual dispatch to force a car onto a job, what happens when there are no cars in the pulling areas and drivers need to bid for the work? From what you tell me, if you have no nearest car facility then how does it sort out which is the successful bidder?

Right back to the gardening.

Bill

I mislead you.

You can of course allocate anyjob to any driver.

What I meant was you can't stop the system sending a job automatically an unallocated job to a free car which meets the required criteria and is in the same zone as the job.

With Auriga's Sirius we have the option to halt all automated despatch and do it all manually. With Cordic that option doesn't exist.

My controllers would never put Auriga on auto. Now they have no choice, which I like. As I said previously the difference between Auriga Sirius and Cordic for us is that with Sirius the controllers didn't have the ability to action a job until it appeared at fire time.

With Cordic they have learnt to action/plan the job before fire time, so when the job is ready for fire we should know what is going to happen to it.

Then you are just left sorting out ASAP's.

Off to watch another relegation struggle.

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A member of the Hire or Reward Industry

I can't believe that, well I do, but I can't believe any taxi operation could be so flawed.

If the driver near the front of the rank, on pole on the radio, doesn't want the job, then he will let the job go.

Or have I missed something?

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IDFIMH

Sussex wrote:



Not at all susssex man, this is just another example of a communications system not having the features we want and someone therefore telling us it is what we want "because other operators use it OK"

This is the biggest problem with Data, IMHO, it has taken too long to develop to a high standard, I can fully understand why, the cost for the supplier in R&D is huge, on top of which everyone wants their tweeks after all no two operators run in the exact same way do they?

The only winners in the data indutry now and in the future will be and are the suppliers who listern to what the operator wants finds out why they want it, in other words asks questions, the ones who keep telling us what we need blindly will just fade into insignifigance. And rightly so.

Again Cordic seem to tick all the box's for most operators now.

Regards Eric

Sussex

I’m not sure if you missed the point or not. If you’re first off on a rank and don’t want to be dragged off for a booked job, then as you say, you can say no or even ignore it. Either way your still going to be the next to get a walk up job and that’s true whether your working on data or not. We do provide multiple options to deal with this and just about every other situation that can arise and as far as I can tell, customers are more than happy with the way things work.

If any of our customers asks for a change to the core system, we provide it but inevitably this has to be an option because what one company sees as a good idea may be completely wrong for another. And yes, you could argue the way some taxi companies operate is “flawed” but that’s their choice. We can advise but we can’t tell them how to run their business.

Eric

Some valid points there. For sure it takes time and money to develop software, a hell of a lot more than most realize. When we created our core system, we thought it was pretty damn good but nine years down the line we’re still writing code and I suspect nine years from now that will still be the case. Tell that to some though and you get “So your codes not finished then!” I just say the time to start worrying is when we say it can’t get any better because that’s the time we’ve give up trying.

Bill