Thanks to Uber, the new(ish) Second Avenue Subway, and the fact that many people in New York are still working from home, it’s far easier than ever to catch a cab in my neighborhood of Manhattan — and that means that I take far more cabs than I should. That, in turn, means that I’ve been spending a great deal of time listening to New York cabbies complain about all the new competition they’re encountering, and how hard it is to find fares.
While I’m willing to recognize that it’s harder to be a cabbie than in the past, it’s difficult to be sympathetic when so many of them refuse to use two incredibly powerful tools — one that’s relatively new, and one that’s been around since before most of them were born.
The first is GPS, which would seem an obvious choice for people who drive for a living. And yet the overwhelming majority (more than 95%) of the drivers I’ve ridden with don’t use it at all, which means they routinely choose suboptimal routes. (I know this because I often quietly check the route they’re taking on my phone — but I don’t have the courage to tell them they’re taking the slowest-possible path, because I don’t want to seem like a typical know-it-all New Yorker.)
The other tool is 1010 WINS, a local news radio station that gives traffic updates every 10 minutes, alerting drivers to traffic jams, accidents, and every other kind of major holdup, from parades and street fairs to those times when the president is in town, snarling traffic everywhere. In my four decades of living in New York, I have not once heard a cabbie listening to 1010 WINS — every other possible radio station, yes, from heated political discussion in Kreole to every single college radio station from here to Jersey City, but never 1010 WINS, the one station that actually delivers information useful to their profession.
I mention this for two reasons: One, I’m hoping every cabbie in New York will read this and realize that they’re handicapping their performance by not taking advantage of these free, easy-to-use tools. Second, and more important, it made me wonder how many useful tools all us non-cabbies are failing to take advantage of in our own professions. Artificial intelligence doesn’t offer much to cabbies right now, but it has plenty of current applications for accountants and journalists — and yet how many of us are using it? And I can guarantee you that the tax prep or accounting or practice management software that you’ve been using for years has long had plenty of features you weren’t aware of — or, worse yet, chose to ignore.
So the next time you’re stuck in traffic because your cab driver didn’t check their route on Waze, why not use that time to think about all the tools you’re not using?
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