Editor’s note: Today's article comes from Jonathan Campos, Chief Technology Officer at Alto. Jonathan shares how Alto has been able to centralize the complete journey for both our drivers and passengers in the Alto app with the accuracy of Google Maps Platform Mobility services and the Navigation SDK.
The rideshare industry is traditionally a business with narrow profit margins. To succeed, you have to do more than simply operate —you have to optimize everything. What most people see when they look at Alto is a ride-hailing service; they see our cars on the road. But Alto is an iceberg. Deep under the proverbial water, we’ve built an infrastructure that makes us incredibly efficient at running and optimizing vehicle fleets.
Since we own and maintain our vehicles, and our drivers are full-time employees, we have a lot of data and a lot of control over how we fine-tune our experience for our employees and our passengers. We continue to implement new technologies that help curate that experience, including AI tools, machine learning models, Google Cloud solutions — such BigQuery, Looker, and Vertex AI — and additional solutions offered by Google Maps Platform.
Unifying the Alto navigation experience
Providing quality experiences for our drivers, passengers, and internal teams is contingent on having accurate location data readily available. Prior to working with Google Maps Platform, we had a handful of datasets in a hodgepodge solution.
Unfortunately, this led to a few places in our overall experience that felt disconnected. For example, our drivers would switch away from the Alto app during a pickup to use the Google Maps app for navigation while the passengers would follow the route in the Alto app. If you’ve ever requested a rideshare and your driver takes a turn, but your app says they should be driving a different way, you start to get a little concerned. We wanted to make sure our passengers feel safe and have an accurate ETA for their ride pickup.
On the drivers’ side, switching between the Alto app and the Google Maps app meant they might miss notifications from our team about changes to their route and would lose immediate access to passenger information such as their profile picture or gate codes. With the Navigation SDK, we’ve been able to centralize the complete journey for both our drivers and passengers in the Alto app with the accuracy of Google Maps location data. With Google Maps Platform, solutions like the Navigation SDK fit together seamlessly with the rest of the suite, and we can plug in pieces over time to build our ideal experience for everyone.
Navigation SDK centralizes the complete journey for drivers and passengers directly in the Alto app.
Redefining rideshare fleet management
As other fleet management companies are trying to improve car turnaround time in hours or days, we’re focused on optimizing by the minute and second, and Google Maps Platform is the not-so-secret weapon that’s enabled that level of control.
Our small team is no longer doing hours of manual maintenance work on our data management or location services; we don’t need to manually create custom drop-off points if there’s a gap in our dataset. With Google Maps Platform Mobility services, we’ve been able to analyze, review, and optimize driver journeys based on precise distances, where we can save energy for our electric vehicles, drivers’ lunch breaks, and more. Alongside our team, Alto has also been aided by Google Maps Platform specialist partner Navagis, to integrate Mobility services with the Alto app.
Greater precision also allows Alto to provide more precise — and even reduced — wait times.
We also no longer need to call drivers directly to update them about route changes or passenger updates. With Routes, we can automatically update our drivers mid-trip about any changes to their ride. This means if they’re heading toward a passenger who reserved a pickup time, we can redirect them to another customer who they can pick up and drop off without impacting the other ride at all. Greater precision also allows us to provide more precise — and even reduced — wait times. Passengers used to wait an average of 10 to 15 minutes, and now they wait five. Serving more passengers with the same amount of drivers in the same amount of time is a game-changer.
Improving the customer journey across the rideshare industry
The infrastructure we’ve built with Google Maps Platform means our drivers are the first ones to busy spots, we know how to get them there faster, and we can forecast in ways other drivers simply can’t. We’re now able to share the advancements we’ve made with the industry to improve passenger experiences everywhere. We’ve partnered with Uber to bring Alto’s consistency, high standards for service, and fleet optimization techniques to their large user base in select cities. Not only that, we’re also sharing which APIs and features we use behind the scenes to help push what their infrastructure is capable of as well.
While we continue to optimize our own systems, we can also reach more passengers even more efficiently. We've gone from 50 cars to hundreds. Next year, we'll have thousands, and each ride will still be just as consistent. When you get into one of our cars, it always smells the same, the driver treats you the same, it picks you up when it says it will. That's not by accident. It's through a lot of hard effort and the work we’re doing behind the scenes with Google Maps Platform.
