Editor’s note: Today's blog post is by Robert Quitsch, Product Lead for the mytaxi Driver App. The company, based in Hamburg, Germany, created an app to connect taxis to passengers in 100 cities across Europe. mytaxi is using Google Maps Platform’s ridesharing solution to improve arrival-time accuracy by up to 48%, reduce ride durations by 4% and improve the driver navigation experience.
People who take taxis often want to get somewhere fast. They want to know when their taxi will pick them up and when they'll arrive at their destination. When mytaxi added the Google Maps Platform ridesharing solution, we helped get drivers to customers location more precisely, faster and reduced the uncertainty around estimated time of arrival (ETA) for passengers. When taxi drivers spend less time searching for passengers, they can take on more rides each day. When cars are there on time, passengers spend less time waiting, and they are less likely to cancel a ride.
Before we integrated Google Maps Platform ridesharing solution, our drivers opened other apps such as Google Maps or Waze to navigate to the destination. Our drivers lost sight of the mytaxi app while navigating to their destination. With Google Maps navigation embedded into our app through the Google Maps Platform ridesharing solution, we keep our drivers engaged and improve driver and passenger experience through more accurate locations and ETAs. More accurate driver locations help us make better driver and passenger assignments. Without accurate driver locations, we underestimated or overestimated our ETAs by as much as 64 percent— resulting in drivers showing up too early, or showing up too late—which didn’t build confidence in our service, or help drivers makes the most of their time on the road.
Integrated navigation helps us provide optimized routes to our drivers based on real time traffic. Even the most seasoned taxi drivers, who may not have used a navigation app before, benefit from the fully integrated, always-on navigation with routes optimized for current traffic conditions. Thanks to a higher usage of navigation, more accurate positioning and bearing provided from the Google Maps Platform Ridesharing solution, our ETA accuracy increased an average of 23 percent—as high as 48 percent in some cities. We also saw our average ride duration drop by 4 percent.
mytaxi is working even more closely with the Google Maps Platform product team on new features that will add even more benefits to riders and drivers. To learn more about the results we’ve experienced, read the whitepaper we jointly developed with the Google Maps Platform team.
