A newly public patent application shows how.

By Jeff John Roberts

Imagine you’re riding a subway and want a driver waiting for you when you step out of the station. Ride hailing service Uber says it has created a way to make that happen—and it wants a patent for the technology.

In a patent application published on Thursday, Uber describes sparing passengers the usual few minutes waiting at the curb for driver to pick them up. Passengers in transit who request a ride ahead of time would have their locations tracked so that a car could arrive at a designated meeting spot at just the right moment.
The system works by monitoring the customer’s device while on the move to predict an estimated arrival time, according to the patent filing. The system combines that data with the location of cars in the area to dispatch the nearest vehicle.

The potential scope of the patent is broad, according to a number of examples cited by Uber to explain why the system may be useful. These include situations where a user is taking public transit to meet an Uber car, or those where “a food truck service, a delivery service, an entertainment service, etc. [is] to be arranged between users and service providers.”

The crux of the claimed invention appears to lie in the way Uber blends different location data to choose an optimal meeting spot.

This excellent article was originally published here – http://fortune.com/2016/02/25/uber-patent-just-in-time-rides/

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