Uber maps sucks so bad
Uber just decided to direct my driver to circle my apartment multiple times. The driver turned a 15 minute trip into a 45 minute trip, simply by following directions from the app. This isn’t the first time the app has directed the driver to drive circle!!! I live in Belltown, Seattle. This is not exactly an obscure location. There’s something seriously wrong with Uber maps. Now support wants to reduce the price I pay from something like $25 to $20. I was quoted around $8!!! Again, this was for a 15 trip, with a promo discount of a few dollars. No traffic or anything. Support is claiming that $20 was the original quote I saw which is patently false. I understand the difference between the quotes and the estimates in the app. I realize with quotes, Uber pockets the difference if I get to my destination sooner. Why am I suddenly being charged more than the quote when the trip takes longer than expected?! Doesn’t that defeat the entire point of a quote? Let me get this straight. If the trip takes a shorter time, Uber pockets the difference. If the trip takes longer, I pay the extra. Sounds fair? Smh At least with Travis, you never scammed your customers. What happened Uber? You used to be cool. To give you an example, the driver repetitively drove between near 1st and bell, to mercer st, and back again. And again. And again. Oh and drove in small circles too for no apparent reason.
Can you post a screenshot of the trip map?
It won’t let me zoom in. 15 to get from the green dot to practically at the destination. 30 min in circles near the end.
https://riders.uber.com/trips/7aed845d-1a6c-400c-9110-5b9634fec1e2 If this helps you debug... Update: Uber discounted me twice, now down to only $11.78. No idea where these numbers come from. At this point it’s not worth my time to disputes about $3. I honestly wouldn’t mind paying more than $11.78 for the original trip, it’s just a matter of sticking to a contract.
Impressed by the response from Uber employees. Quality work 👏
Believe me so many Uber folks log these bugs / issues internally. Uber maps needs so much work, but we have no other choice but to do it all on our own. It’s def improved but google has a 10 year head start.
I would ask for a ticket so I could debug this directly, but we aren’t allowed to look into any specific trips for privacy reasons unless the CSRs escalate the ticket to engineering.
I feel like Uber employees are way emphatic towards their users vs. other ride sharing companies.
Thanks!
I ride with google maps open and ask the driver to follow my directions over theirs when things look strange.
Uber maps are pathetic, especially when your pick up/drop is adjacent to any freeway (like 101) it always directs to the other side of the freeway. Crap.
I’ve also had it direct a driver to pick me up inside a tunnel a block away and underground me. It took me threatening Uber with a chargeback to get a refund on that...
Is it Apple maps bad? No, it’s UBER maps BAD 🤣
JFYI Being from Uber maps I can also say that pricing isn’t part of our services. But I do acknowledge that pickups and drop offs can be problematic also not part of maps org. On a positive note I can say all of this stuff is being worked on.
Took a look at the trip. The initial route (which the upfront fare quoted is based from) was correct. Looks like the driver missed the Western Ave exit off Alaskan Way though, got a new route, continued onwards on Alaskan way, and then took a wrong turn again on the next exit after the tunnel. Oddly, the driver didn’t follow any of the subsequent re-route directions after this missed maneuver and tried to figure things out himself. He/she kept taking the opposite turn of what was suggested and triggering more subsequent reroutes in a 20 minute loop. Did the GPS location seem bad/jumpy in this situation? If the driver misses the initial Western Ave exit, they have no choice but to loop back around. This can fluster some drivers for subsequent maneuvers, which can make the looping worse. Looking at imagery, Western Ave is a thin one-lane exit that runs parallel to the highway for a bit, so I can see how it’s easy to miss.
It was actually my girlfriend taking the trip on my account, and my phone was not within the car. Do you typically use both the driver and customer phones to get a fix on the GPS location? Other than from that, I can’t understand why GPS could have been jumpy. If I recall correctly there was a small number of clouds, no rain, and around an area of Belltown with few buildings big enough to disturb GPS. It did show up as jumpy in the app on my side, but I wouldn’t know if that was network delays or not. You must have data on specific exits / turns etc that are frequently missed. Can you penalise such turns in the route finding algorithm? Perhaps announce them differently, or consider not using a turn if it’s missed once (or even if missed a 2nd time) on a single trip? That would be particularly useful in the case of issues caused by construction.
GPS is always jumpy. Even with zero tall buildings, etc. We (including Google, etc) do corrections at different places to improve accuracy, predict location, etc. Glad you mentioned it was your gf sitting in car. My first thought is why would you let the driver tack on 25min to your ride. Sorry to say, your gf is an idiot (hope she makes it up in other ways), and didn't care how the driver was driving or how long he was driving, and unfortunately he missed a few turns if what the other employee said is right. So there may be nothing malicious on the driver side. Though that is an ungodly amount of detouring and he should be asking your gf how to get to your place after being so hopelessly lost. Or he just wanted to ogle your gf more. Who knows. We don't. Uber cannot determine (with 100% confidence) whether some ungodly long route is due to driver or rider fraud or something else (our fraud team also sucks). Because we pay drivers in the USA by time and distance, both sides have a financial incentive for fraud. So if we don't have confidence of the type of fraud, we invalidate rider upfront fare and sort it out manually post trip if a ticket is opened. For example, a rider might "force" a driver to ignore specified dropoff and go much further, to pay less for a long trip. A driver might dropoff a rider, and keep driving more before ending the trip, to get paid more. I'm sorry for this issue, Uber is just not prioritizing fraud and employees don't take much pride in their work and doing the right thing. We develop features to 80% completeness and quality and move on. Culture encourages and rewards this kind of behavior unfortunately.
I don’t think the jabs at the fraud team were warranted. Our loss rates are significantly lower than ecommerce peers - part of that may be due to trade-offs in product (like recalculating upfront fares that take significantly longer/farther than expected), but that doesn’t mean they are bad at their jobs. Every trade-off they’ve been involved in getting from product teams has been hard fought, and it saves us a TON of money every day. If it weren’t for them we would have blown all of our money in China and India and wouldn’t have anything left to invest in LATAM.
I apologise for that. With regards to fraud team I am speaking with limited information.
Wait so what is the upfront fare exactly? Is it an estimate or is it a quote?
Ugh. That sounds terrible. I would keep replying back to support that this problem isn’t resolved until you get fully refunded and it should be easy to see on our side the path and time the driver drove.
Makes sense. But support is quoting the original price I saw as something other than the price I saw. What’s up with that? Also anything I can do to ensure this doesn’t happen again? I once managed to get an invite to a customer panel to discuss this issue, but had a work emergency and was unable to go.
If there’s anyone here in maps, I’m happy to give you a trip ID or something.