Uber to develop own maps for Toronto
Starting Monday, Uber will have dozens of cars on road taking images, figuring out best pick-up and drop-off spots.

TheStar.com
Sept. 19, 2016
Vanessa Lu

Ride-hailing company Uber will be dispatching dozens of mapping vehicles across the Greater Toronto Area, beginning Monday, as it tries to pinpoint the best pickup and dropoff spots.

Too often, a passenger might wander out to the street, wondering where specifically to look for the Uber vehicle.

“We really need to figure out from every location where a user requests a ride, what is the best area where they should stand to get picked up,” said Manik Gupta, Uber’s head of mapping products, in an interview from San Francisco.

Even though many GPS services exist as well as Google Maps, none of these services would provide that intricate level of data, he said.

“That’s the reason why we are investing in building this layer of information,” Gupta said, though he declined to disclose what it will cost to map Toronto, with an estimated 65 vehicles here for several weeks.

When the mapping plan was first announced in July, the Financial Times reported the company was investing $500 million. It began mapping in Mexico, and Toronto is the second Canadian city to undergo mapping. Edmonton was the first.

The mapping is aimed at UberPool, a service that allows two riders heading in the same direction to share the cost of the fare; a passenger already in the vehicle can easily be frustrated by time wasted trying to find the other rider.

“Our cars are going to go out and collect imagery of many areas in Toronto, and identify the best pick-up area for each intersection, or each building,” Gupta said, adding the images will not be published.

Uber has no plans to set up formal sign locations like bus stops, but could use “a marker,” a coloured bubble on the map, to make it easier for drivers and riders to find each other.

“In some cases, we will say to a rider: Can you walk a little ways to make the pick-up better?” Gupta said. “In some cases, we will route the driver in a different direction to come back to you.”

UberPool began as a pilot project in Toronto in July 2015, during the Pan Am Games, and was formally rolled out in January.

Last week, Uber also introduced a new upfront fare system, whereby riders will be told the estimated price of their ride based on supply and demand — thus eliminating the words “surge pricing.”

However, surge pricing would still exist, hidden in the explanatory sentence “prices are higher due to increased demand.”