In the mid 00’s I lived on a street that was separated into two halves by a marsh. I lived on the southern portion. At the time Google maps didn’t have the marsh, showing the street as continuous, and would routinely send deliveries down the northern portion of the road only to have drivers claim “there’s no such house number”. It took 2 years for them to correct it.
At the risk of a stupid question …
Now that you know what’s going on, what happens when you tell the taxi dispatcher “Tell the driver that after they arrive at the address they MUST go up the driveway to find the building where I am”?
Taxi dispatcher? What millennium are you living in?
Which reminds me, another problem getting a taxi is giving the address. Assuming that the first thing you do is choose English as your language (my French is awful) but then try to give an address on a street with a French name and be understood. I don’t know, for example, how to say Côte des Neiges (a major thoroughfare in Montreal) in such a way that the English module will understand it.
I use Uber / Lyft. Which is admittedly getting harder as my eyes get worse, and I’m a lot younger than you are.
The last time I used a conventional taxi was ~5 years ago, but at that time the only way to get one around here was to call a phone number and speak to a recent immigrant whose English was very limited, but at least their accent was nigh impenetrable. And who had no info on when the taxi might arrive or which car number it would be. Then you wait indefinitely hoping somebody shows up. And further hoping the driver’s English and local area knowledge was adequate to understand where you wanted to go and how to get you there.
How’s it done now where you are? I’m genuinely curious.
You said you will have to learn to use Uber, so I assume you are not using it now. You aren’t hailing a cab on the street or you wouldn’t have this problem. How are you calling a cab without a dispatcher being involved and also without any opportunity to give specific instructions ( which Uber allows me to do) ?
Here’s how. You dial the number. A voice mail system answers (in French, but that is followed by a message, “Press 9 for English”) and then the voice mail asks for my address. If the street name is in French, that can be problematic, as I described. My home street is an English name so that’s usually okay. Besides the system has a record of what addresses I have asked to be picked up from. Then the voice mail asks whether the order is for right away or another time. As if happened I wanted a taxi for the following day at 1 PM. So I guess I punched something to indicate it was for another time. Then it prompted my to say when I wanted it. “Tomorrow at 1 PM” I said. The voice mail then said something like, “If you want a taxi on Jan. 23 at 1300, press 1”. Which I did. Whereupon it hung up. At no point was there an actual Homo sapiens involved (except me). I guess it saves them a lot of money to have fired all their dispatchers. For a while, you could stay on the line, not answering and a human would come on, but now if you don’t answer one of the prompts it just hangs up.
Yipes. “Progress” strikes again. That’s super frustrating as the kids would say.