[zb]

The one time I ordered an Uber, we spent 25 minutes waiting while the driver drove around a similarly (but still quite distinctly) named street on the other side of town. After several phone calls, she ended up using her own GPS navigator to find us.

So I can corroborate what this article is saying: Uber has absolutely no clue where you are even given both an address and map co-ordinates. Presumably they rely on a terrible reverse geocoding implementation and discard the other information. That's surprising, because years ago I used to work on firmware for navigation devices and I don't recall reverse geocoding ever causing major issues (there were always minor inaccuracies when you round-tripped the data, but you never ended up on the wrong side of town) - I thought it was a solved problem.

For the record, neither Google Maps nor Apple Maps have ever had trouble distinguishing between those two locations (though humans sometimes do), so they broke it all by themselves.

[good_claire]

Author here - very interesting to find that someone else had the same strange experience. Street names have no place in GPS navigation! The instance I spoke about was a time when there had been a concert at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley, and I am sure that all available UBER drivers were busy driving people home - hence, even though I was 20 minutes away, I might still have been the closest driver. But the estimation of "3 minutes" combined the GPS path showing me leaving from Piedmont Ave. in Berkeley - when I was on the same-named street in Oakland - makes you doubt their app works at all!