

How we nearly doubled driver reliability - ajju
http://aarjav.summon.com/2014/08/04/how-we-nearly-doubled-driver-reliability-at-summon/

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rictic
This is an interesting article, and I dig the message of measurement and
iteration. One big question that is left unanswered though is why drivers
reject riders in the first place. Is it with the hope of getting a better
rider soon (better rating, closer departure, longer trip), because they're
busy and can't take a rider at the moment, some sort of prejudice or
discomfort with some visible attribute of the rider?

Presumably drivers get paid per ride, so a 50% average ride acceptance rate
seems like a strange situation to be in.

~~~
ajju
Rictic: I should have addressed this in the post! Our _minimum_ reliability
rate is 50% but a vast majority of our rides are done by what we call our
exclusive drivers who have a 70% (soon 80%) reliability rate requirement with
additional perks. I will update the post to clarify this!

There are multiple reasons why a driver might not accept a ride but they all
revolve around the fact that drivers are not our employees and they often are
unable to or forget to become unavailable when they should be:

\- She just took a break to have lunch (should have turned the app to
unavailable but forgot)

\- She is a taxi driver (we have both taxi and personal drivers on the
platform) and just picked up a ride on the street and got a 2nd ride before
she could turn unavailable (we measure volume in rides/second at busy times)

\- She drives for other platforms as well and accepted a ride request on it
before she could turn unavailable

\- Each driver has 15 seconds to accept a ride before it goes to another
driver. Sometimes the real world intervenes and you can't accept the ride in
15 seconds, especially if you are driving and not pulled over.

One more data points:

\- I can't speak for Uber/Lyft but if you talk to their drivers you will see
that their requirements are similar if not lower.

~~~
kenrikm
15 seconds seems a bit low considering it can take a few seconds to open the
app, have you tried testing other times? I know it's a balance between getting
the rider an answer quickly and giving the drivers time however you may force
an available driver to miss the dispatch if it's too low.

~~~
ajju
We have! It's an interesting tradeoff between making the riders wait too long
for their ride to be matched to a driver (in many cities the waiting threshold
after which a rider gives up on the app is firmly in seconds) and giving the
driver enough time to safely accept the ride.

I see you work for iCracked =) I am a user, and have been seeing your iCracked
cars around. Really interested in how your system works in analogous aspects!

------
WhitneyLand
Clicked to read how to increase the reliability of device drivers. Looks like
neither one is an easy task.

~~~
ajju
The only device driver I wrote was in my advanced operating systems class in
grad school nearly a decade ago, but I'll say amen to that :)

------
sushid
I'm not sure if I fully understand how the RR is calculated. I'm assuming that
when a user requests a driver, the app pings 2-4 drivers nearby. If one driver
out of the 2-4 pinged accepted, all but one should have their RR lowered,
lowering the average RR across all drivers.

Is there a primary potential driver who gets docked in this case or have you
guys simply reduced the number of pings to potential drivers per request (i.e.
go from making 4 driver requests to 2)?

~~~
swagasaurus-rex
I'm also confused by this. My guess is either

1) Only one driver is pinged, and they have a narrow window to accept until
the offer is removed and given to a different driver.

2) Multiple drivers are pinged. If any one of them accepts, the other drivers
are not penalized (but lose the opportunity for accepting this offer). If no
drivers accept, all of them are penalized.

------
doctorpangloss
> We offered temporary monetary incentives for drivers

Ah, so paying drivers more made them more interested in accepting rides?

~~~
ajju
Initially, yes. The incentive was more because we had screwed up in explaining
the system to them the first time, and we wanted them to take a second look at
our improve iteration.

------
jhh
This article makes me almost sure that this company will not exist for much
longer. Such a complicated and twisted thinking about a conceptually simple
microeconomic question is not a good sign.

Why not just force drivers to accept any ride? Congratulations you now have
100% reliability.

~~~
ajju
JHH: Sorry you feel that way. We can't force drivers to accept a ride because
they are not our employees, because they sometimes work with both us and
another app, and because the real world intervenes to make 100 percent
reliability impossible. However, I should definitely have explained this
better in my post. Here's what I said to another commenter below.

Our _minimum_ reliability rate is 50% but a vast majority of our rides are
done by what we call our exclusive drivers who have a 70% (soon 80%)
reliability rate requirement with additional perks. I will update the post to
clarify this!

There are multiple reasons why a driver might not accept a ride but they all
revolve around the fact that drivers are not our employees and they often are
unable to or forget to become unavailable when they should be:

\- She just took a break to have lunch (should have turned the app to
unavailable but forgot)

\- She is a taxi driver (we have both taxi and personal drivers on the
platform) and just picked up a ride on the street and got a 2nd ride before
she could turn unavailable (we measure volume in rides/second at busy times)

\- She drives for other platforms as well and accepted a ride request on it
before she could turn unavailable

\- Drivers have 15 seconds to accept a ride before it "goes away". Sometimes
the real world intervenes and you can't accept the ride in 15 seconds,
especially if you are driving and not pulled over.

One more data points:

\- I can't speak for Uber/Lyft but if you talk to their drivers you will see
that their requirements are similar if not lower.

~~~
jhh
Sorry. I regtretted my comment the minute I sent it.

I wish you all the best for your product.

I meant the thing about forcing the driver in a sarcastic way.

~~~
ajju
No worries. Appreciate the good wishes.

