Driving customers

• Extra help
• What you need
• First step
• Getting Dispatch customers
• Getting Taxi Rank customers
• Navigation
• Understanding fares and tips
• Rating and customer satisfaction
• Abandoning customers

This is the central element of the game. Driving customers is the main way your taxi company can make money.

There are tips on driving shown in the left hand-side panel. You should keep them enabled while you’re getting the hang of things.

If you have disabled these tips, you can re-enable them on the help page.

In order to drive customers, you need to have a car in good condition with a driver assigned to it. The car should be listed as Awaiting orders.

All driving activities are done on the Drive page. Once there, select your available car by clicking on it (or clicking on its plate name in the list on the left).

In the bubble, click Dispatch or Pick up at rank.

When using the Dispatch option, you query one of the dispatches available to you. They provide you with a list of customers currently waiting on that dispatch.

If you have access to more than one dispatch, they will be shown on the map, and you will need to select the one you need by clicking on it (or on its name on the right hand-side panel). If you only have one dispatch available, it will be selected automatically.

Customers will be located randomly within the dispatch’s catchment area, and their destinations will likewise be randomly located there. See the section on dispatch functioning for more details

When talking to a dispatch you can specify the desired journey distance. This indicates your preference for the customer’s journey (how far will they want to be driven). However, since dispatches operate by keeping a queue of customers, there are no guarantees that there will be any customers wishing to be driven the distance you enter. Rather, the dispatch queue is ordered based on the distance you enter.

Clicking Talk to the dispatch will show you a selection of customers from the dispatch queue.

If you have a premium account (or started to play very recently), the customers and their destinations will be shown on the map for you. You can mouse over the markers to see details of each.

If markers are not shown, you can make them appear by clicking Show on map. This will charge your company a small fee (based on the average driving distance of customers in the queue).

You should select a customer whose location is close to your car (keeping in mind that some places might be harder to drive to than others). You also want to select customers who want to be driven further, as that provides you with more revenue.

Once you have identified your desired customer, simply click on his start marker (or Take this customer on the left-hand side).

With taxi ranks, you get to choose where you want to end up, and then pick up a customer at the rank that goes to that general area.

Simply click on the taxi rank you want (either on the map, or in the list on the left-hand side). You will then be asked to enter the name of a place you want to go to. This works on the neighborhood level, and will present you with a list of places known to the game as you type. You need to select one of these places, and a Find a customer in <desired location> will appear. Clicking it will find a customer for you and allocate it to the car.

Your driver will need to wait for the customer to show up at the rank. More details are available in the Taxi ranks section of this guide.

Place names

Our place name database is derived from various data sources, and as such they don't match what you see on Google Maps exactly. Neighbourhoods especially are quite detailed, and tend not to be marked on Google Maps. However, all addresses appearing in the game are derived from the same data sources, so if you pay attention to addresses your customers appear at, you will eventually learn place names.

Once you get a customer allocated to a car, your driver will need instructions on how to navigate the route.

Each driver has a Navigation skill. This indicates how far he can drive without any instructions from you. All drivers can drive for 1.2 miles plus between 0.12 and 0.93 miles for each point of navigation skill (more points provide higher increase, as described here).

When instructing a driver, you are shown a blue circle around the car (with a radius based on his navigation skill). The driver knows how to get to any point within the circle.

You need to place a series of waypoints from the car’s starting location, to the customer, and then to her destination. Waypoints tell the driver what steps he needs to take to drive the route.

This short video(TODO) should make it slightly easier to understand.

Using Auto-Route

If you do not want to perform navigation yourself, simply click the Auto-Route button. This will navigate automatically, but “dumbly”. Automatic routes are rarely good or efficient.

What you get from driving customers consists of two parts: fares and tips (yes, capitalist swine really do take all of the tips drivers get from them.)

Fares consist of fare initiation (fixed $7.08) and $2.40 per kilometre, plus some extra if your car has more than 2 seats. However, since we're in the 21^st century, the distance is taken is the straight line distance between the customer and her destination (that is, as the crow flies.) Minimising your driving distance will serve you good because of that.

The real money maker for you is going to be tips. Tips are determined based on a convoluted formula that takes into account:

• Marketing quality of the dispatch/rank you've gotten the customer from.
• Furnishing quality of the car.
• How many seats the car has (each additional seat increases tips by 12.00%).
• How charismatic your driver is.
• Time taken to drive the customer (after all, no one wants to be driven in circles.)
• And how well-established your company is (companies with more partners get better tips.)
• Possibly more?

Improving any of the above will increase your tips and thus significantly increase the amount of money you make. Notice that all the above parameters are under direct control by you.

Once you finish navigation for a customer, you will be presented with a fare breakdown, and you have an option to re-try your navigation to get a better route.

Each customer route you do is assigned a rating. This is calculated based on the driving distance and driving time of your route versus those for an ”ideal” driver (route as calculated by the mapping engine’s routing algorithm). Maximum achievable rating is 1600.

In addition, you are shown customer’s satisfaction with your route. It is calculated based on how long it’ll take to drive your route versus an ideal one.

You can abandon a customer assigned to a car at any time. This may be necessary if it is not possible to drive the customer (either because the car isn’t able for it, or the distance is too long to perform navigation for your driver). You may do so by navigating to the car’s page, and clicking Abandon customer. There is a fixed penalty of $6.00 for abandoning customers, and you of course forfeit any money due from the customer, nor do you get refunded the money you paid t accept the customer in the first place.