Game On Pause

Here's the thing about doing rideshare work. It has elements of gamification.

Assuming you are good enough at hygiene, service and safety, both Lyft and Uber want to incent drivers towards exclusivity. They do this through consecutive ride streak bonuses, quest bonuses when you achieve a certain number of rides in a time period, and a points system per quarter. 

All of that means that, up to a certain level, you make more per hour if you work more.

Here's the problem with that. If you don't live near or in an area with consistent work, or if the demand drops through the floorboards due to, well, a once in a century pandemic...

The math doesn't work. Even with the games.

Here's my per app hour graph from the past six months, which is to say, when I started doing the job again after the pandemic got under control in central New Jersey. 

Note that this is not per actual hour -- breaks, resetting to populated areas after long drop offs to prevent ineffective next rides, and getting back to base at the close of a shift is all unpaid, which means about a third of my time isn't making money.

At a global level, that's the whole ballgame. I can drive around with the windows rolled down, wearing a N95 mask inside of a cloth mark, with a face shield on top. I can sterilize all surfaces.

And if I'm doing all of that for $20 to $25 an hour in my spare time, my family needs the money.

At $10 to $15, not so much. 

See you back when the numbers change...

My last one star rider (for now)

10pm at night, temperature in the low 40s.

The ping comes in for the Trenton (NJ) airport, which is a two-gate place that's light on lines and infrastructure. Because Mercer County does not have enough to do, a police cruiser is pretty much permanently parked at the gate, mostly to deter and harass cabs and rideshare pick ups from happening at the main gate. Pickups happen about 200 feet away, with no cover, near a sign. It's dumb and underdone, but it's not as if my rideshare take is enough to risk a ticket. I go to the drop point, press the arrive button, and wait for my fare.

The phone rings. This is rarely a good sign -- courteous riders text -- and my temptation / instinct is to cancel the ride. But, well, no. It's my passenger, who sullenly tells me I went too far. I inform her that the police are parked right at the gate and give tickets, and I'm not going to risk that. She hangs up.

I see her trudge up to the car. She's wearing a mask, at least. She gets in and tells me that I can't make her walk like that, it's cold out. Strong negative attitude. I repeat the point about the police, and she then LOWERS HER MASK TO YELL about how she works there and how I wouldn't get a ticket.

I just stare at her for a three count, then forcefully tell her to put her mask back on.

We drive to her destination in thankful silence. A little under thirteen minutes, according to the app.

I drive her to her door. She leaves. I dictate the above to the app with my one star review.

My payment for this: $6.85.

No, seriously.                                                                                                              

The Contractor Conundrum

 

With the state of California continuing to advance the case that rideshare drivers are employees and not contractors, Lyft and Uber have been

a) spending a lot of money to try to influence the electorate to vote to let them continue operating as is, and

b) sending surveys to Drives Like Me to see what kind of thing we'd go for, and what we would not, if the world changes and they want to / have to make some of full-time.

The trouble, of course, is the very nature of the work. I'm a full-time driver if and when I have to be, because something has gone sideways in the other ways that I make my nut. If I'm able to sell that time to better places for more money, I do. And if I make enough that I can just occasionally take an evening or few hours off, that happens too. Especially when the surge prices, ride density and bonus packages aren't flowing. It's not just the flexibility of choosing when and how long you want to work, it's a strategy to make sure you are doing so in the hours that make the most sense.

I have no idea how you put this toothpaste back into the tube, honestly. If one of the platforms wants to bid for my services, give me better health benefits, guarantee a certain take home even if the riders aren't there... well, it's a negotiation, let's negotiate.

But how you do that with everyone who could be in the worker pool and maintain a price and business that makes any kind of sense, let alone fails to tank your stock with the people who were only here in the first place because your valuation was baked into no benefits, unions, etc.?

There is one thing I do know, though.

If I'm an employee, I'm a remarkably disloyal one.

Just like my would-be employers!

I have, honestly, no idea. 

And neither, as far as I can tell, does anyone else.

Fewer Stops Than You Think

One of the small but persistent banes of a rideshare driver's existence is the multi-stop ride. As a rule of thunb, we're not making as much when we are stationary, and anything that makes us stationary is, for the most part, Bad. So when passengers want to use us to run errands, it's understandable but not ideal, especially if the amount of time between stops is More Than Zero.

The other night, a woman gets in the car with the very last second mask wear that does not fill your ride share driver with confidence. She proceeds to spend the next 10 minutes on her phone, yelling loudly enough to be heard by rideshare drivers who aren't giving her a ride, and she's got that 200-word vocabulary that just makes me silently start ticking off the number of times she uses a versatile profanity. 

So... she was going to get the three star bum's rush all along.

But that's when I peek in the rear view window because she seems suspiciously loud... yup. Chinley McChinMask, we meet again. 

And no, Dear Readers and Riders, I do not generally confront bad passengers over bad behavior. I'm usually outweighed and outnumbered, and the first rule of rideshare is get home safe. I also have windows down, a three-level mask on, and maybe even a shield. But there's no reason to tempt fate when, well, you don't have to.

So when we get to stop one and she heaves herself into her errand, I drift up a bit to find a parking spot to wait... and after checking to make sure that she hadn't left anything terribly important in the car, end the ride and cite the mask behavior with my sub-3-star review that makes sure that I won't repeat the experience with her in the unfortunate future.

Finally, a use for those stops...

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...