Introducing... Taxonomy

Introducing… Taxonomy

I made an app. If you’d like, you can go straight to it’s NYC BigApps page (and give it a vote!). Or, I can tell you a story.

State of the Taxis

There are over thirteen thousand taxis in New York City. Chances are, if you’re not taking the subway to your destination, you’re in a taxi. Unfortunately, our experiences with them aren’t always that positive. I took a particularly memorable trip a few months ago that went through the wrong side of Central Park and ended with me sprinting down the street to my (y’know, important) destination. As I sat down- apologising profusely for being forty-five minutes late- I thought to myself: there must be a better way. But I had no idea who that driver was, nor whether he was bad at his job or just having a one-off bad journey. Taxis are a totally unknown quantity- where are they, how good are they, how much will my trip cost… there’s just no way to know.

Enter, BigApps

The NYC government is into the tech industry in a big way. One of the ways in which it shows it’s affections is the NYC BigApps contest, which is in it’s third year this year. The premise is simple: make an app that uses some form of open city data, win prizes and promotion. To kick off the 2011/12 round of BigApps, they held a weekend Hackathon at Pivotal Labs, and I went along. Browsing through the available datasets, I stumbled upon a dataset of taxi driver names and IDs and- thinking back to The Longest Cab Ride Of My Life- began to formulate a plan.

The hack I submitted that weekend wasn’t complex (you can read more about it in a previous post, if you’d like)- it took your taxi driver’s ID and tracked your journey through the city, allowing you to review your trip once it was complete. End result: a growing dataset indicating which taxi drivers know their way around (or, to be more skeptical, which ones deliberately go the wrong way), and what their customer service is like. I’m pleased to say that it picked up two awards at the end of the hackathon, and enough positive feedback to convince that I was not alone in my taxi frustration and that I ought to make a full app out of my hack.

Progression

As I sat at my desk with my hacked together webapp in front of me, I realised that it wasn’t enough. Reporting bad drivers is a great incentive for the civic-minded, but if I wanted this app to be used by everyone it needed to be more compelling than that. I got to thinking about a taxi journey from start to finish, where the points of frustration are, and what I could do about them.

Starting at the start- where am I going? I might have the name of a bar, but I’ll have to look that up. Perhaps I have a street address, like “129 E15th St”… but I don’t know where that is. Neither will my taxi driver. So let’s make a destination search engine that allows you to search by name or street address, and that returns meaningful street intersections (“East 15th and Irving Place”) you can use in a cab.

OK, fantastic, so I’ve found my destination. But how much is this taxi going to cost, and how long is it going to take? How about throwing in a custom route planner that works out a suggested route, and tells you the information you need to know about your trip. Bonus points: let’s take all the information we’re receiving from other users (you’re travelling down Broadway at 5mph?!) and use it in our calculations, so you get the most accurate estimate possible.

Now that I’ve gotten a cab, I need to tell my friends that I’m on my way. But what if the journey takes longer than I thought (say, forty-five minutes longer)? Let’s track my journey and make it shareable. Let my friends get up to the minute updates on my current location and destination. While I’m in the cab, why not make some use of the dead time? We both know I’m going to forget to check in on Foursquare when I arrive, so let’s enter that information now. The app can send it in once I’ve arrived at my destination.

But let’s not forget the roots of the app- once my journey is over, we’ll provide options to send off a review of your experience. And we’ll still log what route your driver took to see if they are going the right way.

Oh, and Google maps are boring. Let’s make them look nice.

Taxonomy

The result of these thoughts and three months of “in my spare time” development has created Taxonomy (I hope you’ll agree that it’s a catchier name than “NYC Taxi Tracker”). It’s available for iOS in the App Store, and an Android version is on the way. I also made a promo web site at www.taxono.my for your viewing delight.

The future

You’ll notice that I missed out a step back there- actually finding a taxi. There’s a good reason why Taxonomy can’t do that right now- it isn’t legal to book a yellow cab in New York. So, Taxonomy’s future beyond NYC BigApps belongs with private car services. There are dozens of private car services in the city, and no-one I know uses them unless they’re going to the airport. Yet, you see the black cars out on the streets on a Friday night trying to pick up street hails (which they’re not technically allowed to do).

So, let’s make private car bookings more convenient. Just think what services like Seamless did for ordering food, and ZocDoc did for doctor’s appointments- get rid of the horrible phone bookings, post public reviews to let the best rise to the top- and tie it all into your current location.

Consider this NYC BigApps entry a taste of what is to come- making every taxi journey simpler and faster. And with less arm waving on rainy street corners. So, do me a huge favour and go to Taxonomy’s NYC BigApps page and give me a vote!