mineta - Min-ETA waiting spots for taxi drivers, from road geometry
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Dispatch apps give the ride to the car with the smallest ETA. Mineta analyzes the road network around you - one-way streets, turns, traffic lights - and suggests waiting spots with the smallest average ETA to the area, with the direction to park facing.
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Hi Product Hunt,
I used to be a programmer. After losing my job (thanks to AI) I became an Uber driver, and Mineta comes from a problem I ran into every shift.
Uber and other dispatch apps give the ride to the car with the smallest ETA. So when you're waiting for a call, the question is: where exactly should I park so that my ETA to the addresses around me is as small as possible? The street, the side of the street, the direction you're facing — all of it changes your ETA. A one-way street or a left turn at the exit can add minutes, and the ride goes to another car.
Mineta answers that question. Tap the taxi button and it analyzes the road network around you from OpenStreetMap data and suggests up to 3 waiting spots with the smallest average travel time to the surrounding area. Each suggestion is an arrow pin showing which direction to park facing.
It doesn't use live traffic or demand data — road geometry only. Experienced drivers already know which areas generate customers; the app picks the best spots within the area to wait for a new call.
For the technically curious: the backend is Go with no framework, the frontend is Go compiled to WebAssembly, and routing is turn-penalized Dijkstra computed locally on cached OpenStreetMap tiles — no external routing API.
I'd love feedback — especially from anyone who drives for a living. Try it in an area you know well and tell me if the suggestions make sense.
Quick update: access to Mineta is temporarily limited.
Since launch, I've decided to hold off on opening Mineta to everyone until I've confirmed with the dispatch platforms drivers use (Uber, BiTaksi, and others) that it's fully compliant with their driver policies. Mineta doesn't touch any platform's API or account data — it just works off public map and traffic data — but I don't want anyone risking their account on a tool before I've done that homework.
For now it's limited to my own account and a small circle of people who understand and accept that risk. Once I have confirmation that Mineta is a policy-compliant third-party tool, I'll open it back up to everyone.