[lockes5hadow]

Why can't they just serve the client's location to the driver's device and then have the drivers device handle the estimate?

[jarek]

That would lose scale-dependent ways to improve estimates like current traffic data from other cars, historical traffic and trip-time records, etc

Also won't help with stale GPS location on the phone (which anecdotally has been happening on my N5 more since upgrade to L as well)