Setting the pickup pin properly, and why it saves you five minutes
Most late pickups are not late drivers. They are pins dropped on the wrong side of a wall.
A driver accepts your trip, sets off, and then spends four minutes circling. You are standing exactly where you said you would be. Both of you are annoyed, and neither of you has done anything wrong.
Almost always, the cause is the same: the pickup pin landed on the building rather than on the place a car can actually stop. Geocoding an address gives you the centre of a compound, not the gate. On a large campus, a market, or an estate with one entrance, that can be several hundred metres and a wall away from where you are standing.
Drag the pin
After you have a quote, the map shows your pickup point and lets you move it. Drag it to the kerb where a car can genuinely wait. If the map is easier to read zoomed in, zoom in. This takes about four seconds and it is the single highest-value thing you can do to make a pickup smooth.
The point to aim for is not where you are. It is where a car can stop without blocking traffic and without a barrier between you and it.
Then write the note
The pickup notes field exists because coordinates cannot express everything. "Side gate on the Ring Road side, not the main entrance" is the kind of sentence that turns a four-minute search into a thirty-second arrival. So is "opposite the pharmacy, under the blue awning".
Gate or building information is a separate field for a reason. If your building has a security post that needs a name, or a gate code, or a floor, that belongs there. Drivers read both before they arrive.
Save the places you use repeatedly
If you travel from the same two or three places, save them. A saved place carries its own address and its own coordinates, which means the pin lands correctly every time rather than depending on you remembering to drag it at six in the morning.
For a recurring arrangement such as a child's school run, saving the school as an approved place is worth doing once and then never thinking about again.
What it looks like when it works
The driver arrives at the point you actually meant, reads the note you left, and the PIN matches. There is no phone call, no describing landmarks, no "I can see a yellow building". The trip starts when it was supposed to start.
Five minutes does not sound like much until it is the five minutes between you and a flight.