The Crazy license ($20k) is an interesting benchmark. In one sense it's the end of the game; there's nothing left to do but chase even higher scores. But in a competitive sense it's just the beginning, as some players managed to score over $100k.

There's a point around $30k or $40k, I forget exactly, where you start running out of customers near popular destinations. So you spend more and more time driving without a passenger, which drains your clock and quickly kills your run. Simply driving better isn't enough to get past that hump.

So when I plateaued there, I went online looking for resources and discovered that the customers aren't random, they're mostly deterministic, and that hardcore players reverse engineered the patterns to be able to predict where customers are going.

The city is essentially one big loop, even though it feels like an open map. So the optimal strategy is to keep moving "forward" in the loop, which allows you to spread out your customer pickups. You can't do this unless you can predict where customers are going and (mostly) only take the ones wanting to go forward; if you just pick up whoever's nearby, you fall into a trap of going back and forth to the same few locations over and over, eventually creating dead zones in the map with no more customers while leaving other locations untapped.

Had you told me upfront that memorizing customer patterns was necessary for high level play, I'd have noped out hard because that sounds absolutely miserable, haha. But by the time I found out about it, I was already familiar enough with the map that it felt more like an a-ha moment than a chore.