Taxi! Follow that satellite

Kukiri Asatiani arrived in San Francisco from his native Republic of Georgia seven months ago, so he doesn’t exactly know his way around the city yet. But that didn’t stop him from starting work as a taxi driver last week.

San Francisco cabbies aren’t especially famous for their sense of direction, but it’s a small city, so learning your way around isn’t hard to do. Thanks to GPS — and in Asatiani’s case, Google Maps — the job is getting a whole lot easier. And if the city’s mayor gets his way, taxi drivers won’t have to know their way around at all.

On a recent fare from North Beach to the Lower Haight, Asatiani, who is stocky with dark hair and glasses, seemed a little unsure of his destination. Asked if he knew where he was going, he smiled apologetically. “It’s my first week, so I’m learning. But I have this,” he said, patting a GPS system on the dashboard.

We were heading toward Market Street, one of the city’s main thoroughfares, which wouldn’t have been my first choice, because it has a string of poorly timed traffic lights, but it’s been a few years since I’ve lived in San Francisco, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt.

I suggested he was brave to take a job as a cab driver after being in town only seven months. I wondered if he had to pass a test to prove he knew his way around. “I did, but I sort of cheated,” said Asatiani, whose name has been changed for the purposes of this column. “We had to know some routes, some landmarks, but I looked them up on Google Maps and learned them. I have a good memory.”

He doesn’t plan to be a taxi driver for very long. Coming to the U.S. fulfilled a lifelong dream, he said. He saw pictures of America as a child and always wanted to come. “In America, if you are not lazy, you can do well,” Asatiani said. He plans to take a training course to become a software quality assurance tester. In the meantime, he’s already adept at using technology to make his living. He bought his GPS system on eBay, he said, for $495.

The best route from A to B in any city can be a hotly contested matter, and whether technologies like GPS and online maps can find the fastest route is open to debate. Computers may know all the available routes, but do they know that in San Francisco’s Cole Valley district, for example, between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m., the locals double-park to pick up their dry cleaning and buy groceries after work, and the road comes to a virtual standstill, driving all who pass through insane with rage? Probably not.

That hasn’t stopped Gavin Newsom, the city’s mayor, from asking the San Francisco Taxi Commission to require all of the city’s 1,381 taxis to be fitted with GPS devices. “GPS is the first step we must take in order to make a centralized dispatch system a reality,” Newsom said in his State of the City address last September.

The commission is due to discuss the matter at a meeting on Tuesday evening, where it will also consider findings from a report on the use of technology in dispatch systems. It could choose to require GPS systems in all taxis, or it could decide against it. It is unlikely to make a decision for a few months, said Jordanna Thigpen, the San Francisco Taxi Commission’s deputy director

In the meantime, Thigpen has some ideas of her own about technology’s ability to find the best route.

“It’s like, if you live in the city, and you go to sfmuni.org [the public transit system Web site], or if you go on mapquest.org, how do you know who decided this route? I know secret routes. I know special ways. Does the machine know my special ways? Not necessarily,” she said.

As we trundled along Market Street last week, stopping at red lights at every intersection, I couldn’t help thinking she had a point. Shouldn’t we have headed west instead, through the Broadway Tunnel, then taken Gough and Fell streets, both of which have beautifully synchronized lights the whole way?

About 650 of San Francisco’s taxis, or just fewer than half, have GPS systems today, according to the Taxi Commission. Eventually, they will all have them if the city’s mayor gets his way, although even the taxi drivers might not be pleased about that.

“Some drivers don’t like it because they don’t want to be watched,” Thigpen said. “For them it’s like this Orwellian thing.”

“Of course,” she added quickly, “that’s just a perception.”

Asatiani wouldn’t seem to share that view, though — for him a taxi with GPS isn’t just for convenience or staying connected with dispatch, it’s a necessity.