Area Busyness
Taxi & Private Hire › Products › AreaMetrics › Area Busyness
Generally available
Single source of truth for "is this area busy?" — consumed by trip gating, per-trip health checks, and operator dashboards. Combines learned cell capacity, live supply/demand, operator seeds (Phase 2), and dispatchScore observation (later phase) into a structured Verdict with three orthogonal observability axes (confidence, source, granularity).
Example request
GET /client/{clientId}/area-busyness/at-location
See the API reference for the full request and response schema.
Endpoints
| Method | Path | |
|---|---|---|
GET | /client/{clientId}/area-busyness/at-location · primary | |
GET | /client/{clientId}/area-busyness/cells | |
GET | /client/{clientId}/area-busyness/zone/{zoneId} | |
GET | /client/{clientId}/area-busyness/zone/{zoneId}/heatmap | |
GET | /client/{clientId}/area-busyness/zones | |
POST | /client/{clientId}/capacity-seed/{fleetGroupId}/apply | |
POST | /client/{clientId}/capacity-seed/{fleetGroupId}/preview | |
GET | /client/{clientId}/capacity-seed/{fleetGroupId} |
Full request/response schemas and an interactive explorer will live in the API reference (coming soon).
Settings
How operators configure this feature.
Every area has a ceiling on how many jobs it can absorb before service slips — but that ceiling isn't the same in the city centre as in the suburbs, and it shifts over time. Instead of guessing one number for everywhere, turn this on and the platform studies your own completed trips and quietly learns how much each patch can actually handle, hour by hour. Your busyness warnings and limits then reflect what really happens on the ground rather than a flat assumption. Leave it off and every area falls back to a single baseline rate you set by hand — simpler, but blunter.
On / off · default false
When an area is carrying more work than your drivers can comfortably serve, the busyness gate can step in at booking time. This setting decides how firmly:
- **Off** — the gate does nothing. Bookings always go through, however busy the area is. - **Warn-only** — the booking still goes through, but it's flagged as busy so your team can see the strain. Nothing is refused. This is where it starts, on purpose: you get to watch which bookings *would* have been turned away — and the timeline records every one — so you can decide whether blocking is worth it before you switch it on. - **Block** — a booking into an over-capacity area is refused. Use this once you trust the numbers and you'd rather protect service quality than take every job.
It's deliberately separate from "learn zone capacity automatically": you can keep learning while only warning, or block using the figures you've set yourself.
You can set this for the whole company, or per fleet — so a fleet that runs lean downtown can block while a fleet you're growing in quieter areas only warns.
A note on quiet areas: even in **Block**, the gate won't refuse bookings while an area is below its *growth allowance* — a deliberate overhang that lets you build up quiet, under-served areas. That allowance is tunable per company, per fleet, per zone, or per fleet-in-a-zone, so a busy city centre can be gated tightly while a quiet suburb you're growing keeps taking bookings. See the **Grow quiet areas by taking a few extra bookings** setting.
Modes: OFF · WARN_ONLY · BLOCK · default WARN_ONLY · set per client → fleet
When demand in a zone outruns the drivers in it, every new booking just adds to a backlog you can't clear. This lets you set how busy a zone can get before new bookings show a warning, and then get blocked altogether — protecting service quality when an area is overwhelmed.
| Setting | Range | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Warn at busyness How busy a zone can get (0–100) before new bookings show a warning. | 40–95 | 70 |
| Block at busyness How busy a zone can get (0–100) before new bookings are blocked. | 60–100 | 90 |
Busy-zone limits stop you taking bookings an area can't deliver. This is the opposite lever, for areas you want to *grow*.
In a quiet or brand-new area you often have only a driver or two, so even a couple of bookings can look "busy" against that small capacity. Blocking them would keep the area starved — no trips, so no reason for drivers to work there, so it never grows. Instead, this setting lets you keep accepting bookings until a set number of trips are running in the area at the same time. That small, deliberate overhang pulls drivers in and lets the area build up.
Set it higher in areas you're trying to grow (allow more overhang), or to 0 where you'd rather gate an area the moment it looks busy. You can set it for the whole company, for a single fleet, for a specific zone, or for one fleet in one zone — so you can run a tight city centre and a growth-friendly outer suburb at the same time.
These growth bookings are scored normally. They'll tend to show a lower dispatch score, and that's the point: it's your early signal that an area needs more drivers. The longer drive out to a far pickup isn't held against the driver — their score is measured against their own arrival estimate, which already builds in that distance, so a far growth trip is no harder on a driver's score than a nearby one.
| Setting | Range | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Quiet-area growth allowance Keep accepting bookings in a quiet area until this many trips are running there at once, even when its small capacity would otherwise show a busy warning — a deliberate overhang that pulls drivers in and grows the area. Higher = allow more growth overhang; set to 0 to gate the area as soon as it looks busy. | 0–50 | 2 |