I've been a dispatcher. Taxis, limousines, couriers. I've been a courier. Bike, car, truck. City, rural. I can talk about this at length. In my time, there have been a lot of changes.
Certainly, there has been amazing local knowledge. I have known taxi drivers who could tell you the colour of the door at any given address within a fifty-mile radius. The taxi drivers' test for London, England is famous (www.theknowledgetaxi.co.uk).
There used to be route books that described every intersection and every turn between cities (before the system of large roads). There used to be books that described the address numbers at every intersection in cities. There were reverse look-up books, like telephone directories, for addresses and telephone numbers. I used to collect small-town local maps wherever I went (the town hall, the library, the police station were good places to get them).
For deliveries, we often used postal codes. Many people have various parts of postal code systems memorized (first character, in Canada, denotes province; East to West and North to South, in the USA; first three characters are identifiable subareas in cities, sometimes, down to the building).
I used to compile sublists describing the edges of taxi and/or delivery zones. In the 1980s, I thought about transposing some of these lists onto computerized maps, with look-up/concordance tables and various search functions. Somewhat later (in the late eighties to early nineties), I started seeing expensive data-bases that would put a list of delivery addresses into a logical order, taking into account one-way streets, obstacles such as railways, et cetera). Stuff that I'd been doing in my head. GPS has made this much easier. Large companies have done the work and are often allowing use of it free of charge.
There are still difficulties. GPSs are not yet very good at knowing about real-time stuff like construction and traffic (unexpected or regular patterns). They also don't usually know short-cuts (sometimes illegal or quasilegal -- think of the opening scene in Snow Crash).
Places that are identified by building name rather than an address number. In Japan, I've been told of and I've seen a little of buildings that are numbered by the chronological order in which they were built (in Japan business cards are more common and they often have little maps on the backs). The ubiquity of carrying the internet in one's pocket is helping with these, too.
The amount of time per delivery varies according to the distance, the speeds of the routes involved, time used in not finding the right route or address immediately, and time getting from vehicle to the right person or location within the delivery address (as alluded-to above, this last is often the kicker). I knew bike couriers who just wrote down delivery times in increments of six minutes because it worked.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2013-06-18 04:41 pm (UTC)Certainly, there has been amazing local knowledge. I have known taxi drivers who could tell you the colour of the door at any given address within a fifty-mile radius. The taxi drivers' test for London, England is famous (www.theknowledgetaxi.co.uk).
There used to be route books that described every intersection and every turn between cities (before the system of large roads). There used to be books that described the address numbers at every intersection in cities. There were reverse look-up books, like telephone directories, for addresses and telephone numbers. I used to collect small-town local maps wherever I went (the town hall, the library, the police station were good places to get them).
For deliveries, we often used postal codes. Many people have various parts of postal code systems memorized (first character, in Canada, denotes province; East to West and North to South, in the USA; first three characters are identifiable subareas in cities, sometimes, down to the building).
I used to compile sublists describing the edges of taxi and/or delivery zones. In the 1980s, I thought about transposing some of these lists onto computerized maps, with look-up/concordance tables and various search functions. Somewhat later (in the late eighties to early nineties), I started seeing expensive data-bases that would put a list of delivery addresses into a logical order, taking into account one-way streets, obstacles such as railways, et cetera). Stuff that I'd been doing in my head. GPS has made this much easier. Large companies have done the work and are often allowing use of it free of charge.
There are still difficulties. GPSs are not yet very good at knowing about real-time stuff like construction and traffic (unexpected or regular patterns). They also don't usually know short-cuts (sometimes illegal or quasilegal -- think of the opening scene in Snow Crash).
Places that are identified by building name rather than an address number. In Japan, I've been told of and I've seen a little of buildings that are numbered by the chronological order in which they were built (in Japan business cards are more common and they often have little maps on the backs). The ubiquity of carrying the internet in one's pocket is helping with these, too.
The amount of time per delivery varies according to the distance, the speeds of the routes involved, time used in not finding the right route or address immediately, and time getting from vehicle to the right person or location within the delivery address (as alluded-to above, this last is often the kicker). I knew bike couriers who just wrote down delivery times in increments of six minutes because it worked.