[blakes]

Back in the before times, taxi drivers knew how to navigate a city just by memory. Give them an address and they'd probably know how to find it.

Most likely this app was not navigation. Remember, feature phone, probably had less than a couple hundred MB of memory for the entire device. I assume the app would just give the taxi driver address details and what not.

[mwcampbell]

Oh, even easier then; the phone would just have to read the address aloud. Symbian phones were able to run text-to-speech as far back as 2002; my best friend is blind and used a Nokia phone with a screen reader back then.

[duped]

That's not true in my experience. I didn't stop directing cabbies to my destination until Uber and Lyft became commonplace and I never had to use a cab service again.

In the major urban areas I've lived, every cab drive would start with "take this street to that street" or "head towards major landmark."

Even in cities with decent grids you couldn't trust a cabbie to take the fastest route.

[wolverine876]

> In the major urban areas I've lived, every cab drive would start with "take this street to that street" or "head towards major landmark."

> Even in cities with decent grids you couldn't trust a cabbie to take the fastest route.

I heard these stories and would direct cabs the same way, until I realized that the cab drivers were right and I was wrong, and that the depictions of them as shady thieves who would purposely take you out of your way, or were horribly incompetent, were urban myths.

And I was being disrespectful to the drivers, to presume that and treat them that way. I don't treat other service industry people that way. And if you think about it, cab drives make more from a flag drop than a longer trip - as one cab driver said, 'people say these things to me - do you know how much I make for an extra few blocks? 50 cents? And what is my take of that?'

I learned to trust and respect the cab driver, who after all were human beings, and drove around all day long, and like most people was honest and considerate.

[Talanes]

Being able to get to you and actually taking a good route are two different things though.

How did Cabbies know where to show up when called?

Or did they not? I only ever took Taxis from places I could flag them down pre-Uber.

[rvba]

Most taxi drivers required a license - and that required passing an exam. Big part of the exam was knowledge of town.

People also could tell the "main" roads, which would be known.

On a side note: my usual experience with taxis (not uber) is that they first ask the question to figure out if you know the town or not and then they know very well what is the longest route. Also even when asked for estimate of price it would always be the top.

Big reason why uber is so popular: you wont get a ling ride through whole town and you can rate the driver.

[duped]

Calling a cab resulted in a cabbie showing up maybe 20% of the time. You would hail cabbies in the street.

[bobthepanda]

At least some of the time this was more to stretch out a fare on the unsuspecting, rather than a total lack of local knowledge. Not that it makes it any better.

[wolverine876]

> Back in the before times, taxi drivers knew how to navigate a city just by memory. Give them an address and they'd probably know how to find it.

In what city? London cab drivers famously were (are?) required to pass a memorization test, but in American cities I've had many cab drivers who didn't know their way around. They've been generally better than Lyft/Uber drivers.

[evgen]

In just about every city a cab driver was expected to know where they were going. For more obscure addresses they may have asked for major cross streets or similar, but it was generally assumed that the driver knew where he was going (which led to the inevitable problem when he didn't or when the passenger was not precise in their description of the destination.) You would also always find a Thomas' guide somewhere in the front of the taxi just in case...

[bombcar]

People knew this too - and so navigating by landmarks was much more common.

Some cities are setup so that with most addresses you can pinpoint almost exactly where it is in the city. Seattle’s a good example of this.

Also if you think of most taxi trips they will either be to a major location (hotel, airport, restaurant) or to a place personally known by the rider (house, work).

[MagnumOpus]

These feature phone did have Google Maps, and lists of GMaps directions, and could have done navigation just like the Garmin devices - but they crucially didn't have GPS.

[jmkb]

Dispatch knowing drivers' locations in realtime would have made this a killer app imo. Car services used to assign pickups based on drivers reporting their location by radio.