A Different Kind of Cancel Culture: 10 Reasons Why Drivers Cancel Rides

I may also play Steely Dan

I've had this conversation dozens of times during my time as a rideshare driver.

The passenger gets in the car, listens to me confirm the address and amenities, and then launches into a tirade about how their last driver did such and such. Usually involving canceling the ride.

And while it's rarely, if ever, in my interest to be confrontational or defend some other driver that may or may not be defensible... 

The fact of the matter is that I am 100% certain that I've inspired this same conversation for other drivers. 

So, here's why it happens.

1) You didn't value the driver's time. Rideshare drivers make about 3X as much money for moving as we do for waiting. No rideshare driver wants to wait. For anything. Ever.

2) Other passengers do value the driver's time. We know the way the app works -- how the map shows the car going to your location, how reminders and alerts pop up, etc. Depending on the day and area, passengers are ready and waiting for us, to the point of not having to worry about parking, annoying other drivers, or running afoul of police attention. 

So we know passengers can do better. Those that don't are making a choice not to. And ideally, we would spend our time as efficiently as possible, for people that allow us to do that.

3) A cancel may save the driver from future drama. The passenger that's using the full clock and beyond to get in the car often has other things going on in their life that will spill over into this transaction. Whether or not the driver has time for that is highly variable.

The only real drawback of this is when the ap pings you with the person you just canceled. That's not exactly a comfortable moment. If I had the ability to 3-star a passenger and prevent the next attempt at the ride that didn't happen, I totally would. As is, they more often than not get 3 stars at the end of the re-started ride anyway.

4) The ap told us to. Especially in the middle of a long shift, it's far easier to press the button the second it lets you, rather than extend more courtesy to people who have already exhausted the legal limit. Many drivers are just going to do what the ap tells them to, especially if they are preoccupied with other thoughts (and well, that can happen). 

5) There's a better price on another app. Seven out of ten drivers are on more than one platform, and there's often a better deal brewing somewhere else. Canceling a slow passenger and going to the other platform may also help us avoid getting the slow passenger again.

6) People who make you wait do not tip any more than people that do not. You might think this isn't the case, and that you are totally going to tip the driver for putting them out like this... but, well, passengers who make the driver wait are already breaking the social contract. Expecting them to make up for it is not where, frankly, the data lies.

7) We've got a rides completion bonus to make, and tardy pickups aren't helping. Rideshare platforms routinely gives drivers a Quest number to make before a certain deadline. As we don't control how many requests we get, nor how far they are going or how long they might take, getting to the next passenger who isn't dawdling may be in our strong personal interest.

8) Your area isn't a comfortable place to wait. Rideshare drivers are a little bit like any worker in a hazardous occupation; our first goal is to get home safe, and everything else is secondary. If your area is tight with traffic, heavy with police presence, or puts as at risk of being accosted by people with life challenges... we're getting out of Dodge at the first moment we can. You probably would too.

9) Your rating (or destination) is telling us not to wait. I don't generally pay a lot of attention to a passenger's rating when I accept a ride. I've got about 10-15 seconds to do that, looking at the screen while driving is not terribly safe, and for all I know, you've been the victim of a single unreliable driver. I can always 3-star a passenger at the completion of the ride, and bad fares make for better stories (and grist for this blog!) later. Nearly everyone gets the first ride.

But when I'm sitting for time with nothing else to do while a passenger isn't getting in the car? Well, howdy, I'm checking your rating, Or thinking about how nice it would be to not have to go to your remote destination that isn't likely to make for a good period of my day's earnings.

10) We're making it better for the next driver. Want to know the commonality of everyone who gets in my car after a previous driver canceled on them? They all got there before the clock ran out. Funny coincidence, yes?

Practicing Gratitude: A Really Good Shift

Lyft's most prominent gamification mode for me in 2022 is the use of streaks. Do 3 in a row, no cancels, you get a bonus. It changes the math, but it does open you up to sudden and terrible trips to places you have no desire to go to, that will more or less ruin your shift. (That'd be New York. Anything that takes me to New York is frankly terrible. Tolls, traffic, terrible aggressive drivers, I don't know the roads or potholes, the GPS isn't infallible and I can't pick up anyone in the state. I never want to drive there. No one ever should. Moving on.)

Last night, I'm working a few hours with the goal of getting clear by 9pm, so I can take a few hours off and watch the NBA Finals game. Lyft had a 3 for $18 streak starting at 7pm. Exactly at that time, as I'm heading south on Route 1 outside of Princeton, I turn on the ap. With luck, I'll bang out 3, have a decent hour, then turn it off and head back.

Boom, boom, boom. Three short rides with three pleasant people later, with two of them tipping, I've made $37 in 30 minutes, which is to say, about as much as you can ever hope to make on this, absent a spectacular tipping moment. (I've had a couple of people in the course of 22K rides who gave me $100. More of that, please.)

More importantly, I've done so fast enough to double up on the streak bonus... but now I'm at risk of missing the game. Roll the dice.

The next three are longer and don't tip (less than 10% of passengers do, and this is a 5+ year data set)... but finishes the run 10 minutes from my house, 15 minutes before the game starts. I gassed up the car, made myself a sandwich and watched the game. 

Gratitude! (Also, go Warriors.)

When The App Cheats

Long-time readers of the blog are aware that I've compared rideshare to a triangle, with passengers, drivers and the aps all holding different corners. There are times when things favor one more than the other, and so forth.

As a driver, I've learned through trial and error that trusting the ap to get you paid the most is an express route to leaving money on the table. If you just turn on the ap and take everything that comes your way, you'll have great ratings and poor per hour returns. As my family can not eat my ratings, yeah, I don't much care about them any more. I keep them above the minimum on the number of rides accepted and canceled, and I keep my passengers happy. I'm platinum status on both platforms as I type this.

So instead of just leaving the ap on when driving the current fare, I switch on last ride as often as possible. It's the only way to keep Lyft from piling on random fares in any direction, and the only way to keep Uber from giving me non-surge pricing from some distant area. It's how the game is played. It also helps to keep me in the areas where I feel comfortable driving, because I know where the potholes are, where the speed traps are, where I can find a clean bathroom, and so forth. If you take me to an unfamiliar area, I take you there, and then I go the hell back to my home area ASAP. Again, trial and error.

So when you are out of the ap, you see a map of the area that has surge pricing areas, if any are firing. If you are close enough to get to one, you should, because if you do the job without surge pricing, you make less. A *lot* less.

These surge prices can change every 15 to 30 seconds during busy times, or if you are having phone connection issues. It leads to a lot of hey, that's not the surge price I was expecting, and as soon as you get that next fare for less than what was advertised seconds ago...

Well, you can Like It or you can Lump It, but you are still doing the job if you want to stay in the platform. (Oh, and Uber is especially "good" at this, with half or a third of the advertised price coming your way if you are just a few hundred feet away from the dollar amount when you re-enter the driver pool. Needless to say, this also doesn't really do much for the safety of driving while in the app, but after 10K hours in both aps and +22.5K fares, I'm safe enough. So far.)

Tonight, I was just about to flip on Uber in a $19 surge area... and the zone just melted away entirely as my finger was over the button. I rebooted my phone, because that sometimes works, and the surge was still gone... but hey, just drive a few more miles down the road, because it's $11 there. Or turn on Lyft for $4 extra and...

I just shut my phone off and drove the hell home, because on that day I could. 

Tomorrow or next week, not sure.

So if you're wondering why there aren't any drivers, ask yourself this question: 

If your compensation for working was this arbitrary, would you want to do it?

The Clubhouse Leader For Worst Fare Of The Year

Near Asshats

Folks... I don't talk politics with passengers when it's pretty obvious that I'm not going to agree to them. I also don't have an issue with passengers who don't wear masks, because it's optional now and increasingly a minority of riders. I stil wear mine, and I keep my windows cracked, because I haven't gotten the virus yet and don't really want it. Also, my wife is high risk due to diabetes, so, well, let's just wear the mask. It's really not that hard. My body, my choice, really not an issue to the passenger.

Recently, I was trying to qualify for an Uber bonus on rides given, and the app was not cooperating at all. Nothing but long rides from a long distance away, and the shift is working about half of the effectiveness of when it's good. Some days you get the bear and such. The final indignity is a ride that's 9 minutes away, going 31 minutes east, out into Red Country, away from any kind of surge price or utility. Oh well, nothing to be done about it; I can't afford the cancel. Let's just get it over with.

My pick up is bad from the start, with delays before leaving. The passenger is an older woman, and we're waiting on a bigger guy, presumably her husband. I tell them about the amenities (hand sanitizer and water), and we're off.

I've cracked the windows, as it's in the mid'60s and beautiful outside. As we get on the highway, the guy asks me to close the windows, as he's cold. I do this (by the way, he could have closed the windows himself; I don't use the child safety controls)... and a minute later, he's asking me to turn up the air conditioning, as he's hot. 

Yeah. Wonderful. 15 minutes to go until I three star him and stop doing this for the night.

A few minutes later, they've exhausted conversation with each other and decide to come back to me, despite my absolute silence towards them (and cracked driver-side window). Not too surprisingly, my choice of wearing a mask seems to personally offend this lovely human being. After a paragraph of profanity about how something that's killed over a million Americans (and counting) is all bullshit, I respond with the thing that really should just shut anyone up.

"Sir, my wife is high risk. I wear a mask to keep her safe."

Now, my reason to wear a mask is, in all candor, NONE OF HIS GODDAMNED BUSINESS. But this reason is in fact true, and while it's not the entire reason (I also wear it so that, um, I don't get the goddamned disease myself, and I wear it to make the more educated and sane and tip-likely of my passengers to be comfortable)... it's the biggest reason. I don't know about you, but if I knew that I gave someone a disease, I'd feel bad about it. Don't want to feel bad. So I wear a mask.

This buys me about ten seconds of silence. Then the asshat asks me, sarcastically, if I *like* wearing a mask. Like he's trying to provoke a fight, or imply that I've got some kind of fetish.

It's 2am and we're in the middle of nowhere New Jersey. I know there aren't other cars out here; you'd have to be a crazy person to do rideshare in this area, at this hour. This escalates if I pull over and tell these two to get the eff out of my car.

So I grit my teeth and drive. They later ask me where I live, as if I want to share that information with them, or they just want to get more data for their Some Liberal Drove Us Home fantasy. Since it's where their pick up was, I tell them. I drive them into their specific driveway, and I can tell from their tone as I do this that they have no idea just how close they were to me just pulling over and walking away.

Oh, and because you already knew this... Trump bumper stickers on the cars in the driveway.

There's a culture war in this country, folks. 

You can try not to fight in it if you like. 

But that doesn't mean the other side won't fight you for it anyway.

No, You're Not Wrong - This Is Getting Expensive

The price of gasoline has been a major concern for rideshare drivers for, well, ever... and when I run the numbers in my terrifyingly dense 5+ year spreadsheet of rideshare whimsy, the cost per hour of operation has more or less doubled in the past three months. (Thanks, Putin and our Good Saudi Friends who never increase production levels when an oil shock hits a Democratic Administration! It's almost as global corporate elites subvert democracies! Almost.)

Anyhoo... the rideshare platforms are very aware that this kind of thing is highly demotivating to those of us who choose to do the hustle. A $0.55 universal surcharge on all fares has been imposed, which is better than a sharp stick in the eye if you are picking up a mess of short urban rides, drive a hybrid and don't encounter traffic. Failing those happy conditions... not so much.

By my way of calculating, the true per hour take for me in 2022 is down about 15% -- and my average number of hours per week doing it is also down, by 10.5%.

Since I'm making less and the gas prices are higher, this means that every minute that you do this is more expensive. There's also been a much higher variation between platforms, with Lyft driving more per hour than Uber for the last two months. Driving for Lyft is pretty much the same, but there are clear differences. Starting with...

a) Lyft switches off drivers to other passengers much more than Uber. This means the driver is less likely to have long drives to pick up passengers, but also has less control and knowledge of their time in the program.

b) Lyft doesn't tell drivers time and distance on rides while already in the app

c) Lyft is more likely than Uber to incent drivers with streak bonuses -- which means the driver is way more likely to go to a place they weren't anticipating (and maybe have a really good reason to want to avoid)

So... I turn off the ap between rides, and I check both aps and go with the higher price. You would, if you were a driver, as well. This means that the aps show fewer drivers doing the gig, and fewer drivers are, well, doing the gig. It cycles to more surge pricing and more for the driver in the short term... and maybe less in the long term, because when ride share gets too expensive, passengers will do without or find other means.

But in the long run? The cars drive themselves, and as a driver -- I don't have ownership in these aps. I'm just trying to make my nut today, or if we're getting really far out... this week.

Happy riding!