doPon is short from "Drop Off People and ONboard"
symbol “↙️P↗️”
DoPon is system to enumerate places where people drop off and onboard, near socially popular places, such as wedding halls, malls, stadiums, cemeteries, etc.
It is designed to be used in robotaxi, carpooling or taxi settings, when user is on the go and needs to enter pickup or drop off location.
Scheme
doPon system is global, thus it has both full, short and tiny schemes. Same doPon place might have several doPon code (see shorting below).
Tiny - used in city: @Cid (e.g. @33231) - first digit is always control digit of all digits in doPon code. Second digit specifies amount of digits that follow it (it also serves code shortening - see below). Numbers from second and until first non-digit char is the doPon code of the place in the city.
Certain prefixes might be reserved for already existing system. For example all public bus stations in Israel have unique 5 digits station code. These might be mapped to doPon at, say, “prefix” 5. Thus, a bus station 12345 in Israel will have doPon code @X512345 (where X is control digit)
Short - used in region: @Cid-CityRegionCode - where CityRegionCode might be mapped after phone code of the City or Region
Full - international: @Cid-CityRegionCode-CountryCode - where CountryCode is phone code of the country
Slots A popular doPon place (like in airport or mall) might have several “slots”, where passengers might await for drivers to pick them up. The slots are dynamically directed to, based on demand and availability. To specify slot, one should add + sign after the short doPon code part. For example, full doPon code for slot 12 of doPon place 831 (BenGurion airport) might be @X3831+12-3-972 (where X is control digit).
Codes shorting
It is expected that popular places will have shorter codes. These are easier on people to remember and type. Codes with “eternal” prefix (such as 1 to 3) could be printed on billboards and memorized by people easily.
In practice it is hard to estimate place popularity, thus a graduation approach should be used. Initially, any place submitted into the system is assigned longest code possible (say 7 digits). If the system sees many lookups for the code, it will get graduated to shorter code. After that, use of old code will cause warning about the code graduation.
doPon place
A physical doPon place should have several features:
- It is well suited for a car (especially autonomous cars) to stop safely and allow passengers pickup and drop off
- It has easy way for driver to turn back
- It is wheel-chair or scooter friendly, passengers have easy way to reach socially popular places nearby
- A popular doPon place might have several clearly marked “slots”, probably spread at different entrances. Slots on both sides of a road might be arranged in street-like buildings order for more human-friendly navigation.
