Why You Can't Get Rides: The Thread and the Triangle

This last week, one of my free-lance clients more or less took a summer break. Not incredibly unexpected, and certainly not fatal to our long-term relationship, but it is what it is: suddenly, there is less money in my life. Combine this with two major bills, and I had to get back in the car for significant hours to make my nut. So be it; that's what rideshare is for, after all. Employment court of the last resort.

Just in time for the Uber app to more or less stop working for me. For the better part of a week, no matter what kind of surge price zone I was in. Here's a screen shot from the first ten, very frustrating, hours of the week.

Note that my surge price was a lot more than the regions were showing? That's because I had been in the app for hours without a request, turning it on and off, reinstalling the software, checking my Internet connection, and so on. Eventually, I just left Uber on while doing Lyft work for less, on the off chance that it would finally start working again, and I'd finally catch that nice surge price.

Here's the impact this had on my net hourly rate. (Well, that and Lyft sending me to on a two-hour plus trip to JFK without warning, because that's the kind of thing Lyft likes to do, and a big reason why I try not to drive for Lyft anymore.)

7/5-7/11: $19.26 per hour

6/28-7/4: $34.90 per hour

6/21-6/27: $36.44 per hour

6/14-6/20: $38.65 per hour

I had no way to fix this, no way to re-start my revenue, no way to actually connect with the customers that the platform is supposed to provide to me. Through no fault of my own (current driver rating: 4.96; I'm good at this), my revenue from Uber went to zero on four different shifts. Thank heavens I had Lyft as a (not as good) back up, or the bad financial week would have been even worse.

FYI, I finally started getting requests again-- after alerting me to an Uber Driver app update, and only after a half dozen form letters to various complaints that showed absolutely no evidence of the rep actually reading the complaint. Always with a very Indian sub-continent name, and always overnight, so, yeah, you can tell charming stories of how much Uber is paying customer service reps.

Anyway, getting back to the triangle. Until cars drive themselves, rideshare is best imagined as a triangle. Mark one corner as D for Driver, another as R for rider, and the last as P for platform...

Now, find a place where D, R and P are all happy.

Make it too good for the driver and platform and it costs too much; passengers find another option, especially in the long-term. Make it too good for the rider while still paying the driver, and the platform takes it in the neck from the stock market for taking too long to turn a profit (if ever). Make it too good for the rider while still paying the platform means the driver will find something else to do with their time.

That's what the vast majority of drivers did during the more brutal parts of the pandemic, and in all likelihood, will continue to do -- unless there's a massive and long-term change in the math that just forces a more expensive ride on riders, or a lower take for the platforms.

And even then, the platform can end a driver at any moment, because no matter how many rides we've given (me: over 18K), we're all hanging by the thread of the next request.

Which, as the first ten hours of Uber showed me last week, may never come.

And that, my dear passengers, is why you are having such a hard time finding someone to pick you up...