Out Of State Hate

I live about 15 minutes from the border to Pennsylvania. Which means that many times a week, especially if I take all available rides (i.e., what a rideshare platform would prefer that I do), I can leave the state to do the work.

And as soon as I do so... the apps more or less stop working, in that they do not find me any rider from inside the state to take. (Adding to the fun: sometimes an app will log you out and disrupt a consecutive ride bonus, but if you pule to them afterwards and show your time in the platform, they usually change it back on the operator end.)

Needless to say, this blows. Hard. Especially if you run into a streak of people going to, say, Sesame Place or Bristol or Fairless Hills or etc. It blows even more when there are big events going on in Philadelphia.

It also means that I'm constantly using the percentage of rides that I do not accept on these likely out of state riders, and flirting with having just enough taken rides to balance my hourly wage against staying in the good graces of the app.

There is, however, a way that I can *kind of* protect myself, which is this: take the passenger out of state, but give them three stars or less to make sure you don't get them again.

Which... I'm not going to say if I do, because that seems mean and petty and like I'm taking out the failures of a platform on innocent passengers.

Who, um, I'd rather not see again, since they take me out of state...

So, Uber? Lyft?

Fix this nonsense. Make it a priority. I get that you've got legal beef with places like New York City that prevent you from letting every Jersey driver go putter around Manhattan, but honestly, it seems like that town's got better things to worry about right now.

And in the meantime, the good people of Morrisville, PA and upper Bucks County may really start feeling like there's something wrong with the platform, what with the paucity of drivers...

No comments:

Post a Comment

For Scarlett, and her mother

 I'm an email and digital marketing consultant, and rideshare is the client of last resort. I tend to do a lot of it around the holidays...