Driving Strangers

Gratitude (And That's Right)

The other night, I'm working in Princeton during a surge time. I get a run of nice short rides with nice short people; good conversations and tips and nothing too far away from each other. It's going well. Which is when I get a ping from 17 minutes away, in Trenton.

Well, in every life a little Trenton must fall, and I've had many good shifts in that town. I know the potholes, I know the area, short rides happen and it's also in a surge zone. The 17 minutes of dead time from now until then isn't great, but it's also not avoidable. Away we go.

On pick up, after several minutes of waiting and it's about an hour before when I want to shut down for the night... I discover that either the platform failed to tell me it was a long ride, or the passenger changed it later. So eat 70 minutes to Wilmington, Delaware, with the added bonus of (a) the ap does not work for me in Delaware, (b) the passenger is neither nice nor tipping, and (c) yeah, this blows. By the time I finish the drop and do the backtrack, it'll be for substantially less than average per hour, and below average hours? I'm not a fan of them.

The next day, I start things in a streak time, which is when you have to do three in a row in the same ap, no matter what, to activate the bonus. Once again, the ap does not warn me for overly long ride (different ap!), and now I find myself in who the hell knows where I am upper central New Jersey, where no one needs rideshare, the roads are all one lane, it's raining and the drivers all are in aggro SUVs and driving me off the road. I wound up eating the hour and forgetting the streak, and doing a lot less with that ap than usual for the rest of the day. It's important to show the algorithm that's in no way working for the best interest of the driver that there are consequences for poor performance. (OK, it's not.)

The trick when things are going downhill is to try to practice gratitude. The car's running. Good hours exist. Later on in the shift, I'll get taken to the Philadelphia airport, get tipped handsomely by the kind passengers, then wind up getting a $27 surge price on a $4 ride. For a few hours there, I was making a lot more than I make for doing my other hustles, for work that I often prefer doing, truth be told. (Dealing with some of my clients is not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach.)

But these surprise super long rides that the aps are supposed to warn you about, and aren't?

Don't make the act of gratitude very easy.

Play me out, Manhattan Men...

The Price Of Perfection

Years ago, when I started doing work for this side hustle, I did the following.

> Took every ride that was given to me

> Gave passengers extra time before canceling

> Stayed in the app during the ride

> Didn't "chase" surge areas

> Took every long ride

> Gave freebies to passengers (drinks, breath mints, cough drops, and sometimes even candy)

> Had a near-perfect record

and...

> Made about 30-40% less per hour than I do know.

Perfection, you see, comes at a price. If you take every ride, you are taking less lucrative rides than others. If you give extra time, you create a culture where passengers take extra time left and right -- and in my experience, the tardy passenger isn't usually a tipper, either.

Staying in the app during a ride means that you are available for any ride in queue -- which means you can't see if it's coming from a surge area. It also drops the price for the area, since the apps have more drivers to draw from.

Not chasing surge areas seems like the right thing to do for the environment, but the reality is that doing the work without a surge price is a sure way to drive your car to death. Exceptions happen, but if you just set and forget, and don't check between apps, you're leaving money on the table.

Taking every long ride means you are going to go to areas where you are at a much higher risk for flat tire, speed trap or traffic violation. It should never be done for the first time after dark especially... and Lyft, especially, is good for passengers who are going remote. If all you do is drive back to start on a long ride, that's equal times bad times and good -- and also puts you at all-or-nothing on the tip from that passenger.

Freebies don't generally increase tips. They do increase mess. You have to pick your spots on those.

Today, my ride acceptance rate is near the absolute minimum it can be to stay on the systems. So are my cancellation rates. I may eventually build it up to a little bit of a cushion, but probably not much of one.

So if you are a driver, and you are wondering why other drivers seem to be doing better than you?

Check to see you aren't chumping yourself.

You don't work for a platform. You work to stay on it.

And so long as they are more or less paying you less to be a perfect driver...

Well, why would you want to be a perfect driver?

Supporting Your Parenting Choices

To be fair, having ice cream shows hustle

I pick up two passengers at the local mall. It's a two stop trip, the first at a boarding school to drop off the younger one, and the second at the train station. They present as Asian, female, and split in ages, so it's not hard to presume mother and daughter. They chat amongst themselves and as it's none of my business, I focus on the road and get them where they are going to. Nothing out of the ordinary.

We get to the first destination, and they are saying their goodbyes. The elder rattles off a line of well-meaning advice cliches that the teenager is clearly not listening to, ending with:

"Don't get into cars with strangers"

Which I do not react to, because this is one of those rides where I'm quasi invisible support staff today, and will be a self-driving car tomorrow... but, um, ma'am?

You just did that.

In front of, and with, the kid you are telling not to.

Which made me consider, but not act on, the impulse to drop my voice a few octaves, lean over salaciously, and agree with the mom while cosplaying a Bad Stranger...

How Much Should This Cost

Note The Variance

Because news feeds are like this, I get stuff in my daily diet of headlines about rideshare all the time. Recently, this included a story from Perth, Australia where the writer shared the dastardly knowledge that drivers were intentionally logging out of the system in between fares to goose up the scarcity and create costlier rides.

I have thoughts.

1) Your driver does not really work for Uber or Lyft or DoorDash or any other system you can name. They work for themselves, and briefly and intermittently, their passenger. There is no incentive for the driver to behave “better” for the passenger by doing things that make rides cheaper for those folks. There is, in fact, a disincentive for doing this. Hence, um, why drivers are doing this. (Also, fun fact? People who are not paying surge price do not tip any more or often than people who are. At least, that’s what monitoring of my income proves.)

2) The idea that there is an amount that a ride “should” cost has a lovely implied bias that (a) the base rate is fair (it’s not), (b) the writer or algorithm knows how much a driver should make (they don’t; this is all real-time guesswork from machines), and (c) the passenger well and truly deserves to keep every last penny they can from the platform and driver (um, not how capitalism works).

Defend these answers? Sure. The price of gas is up about 30% in the last few months locally from global forces (thanks, Putin!), but the price per mile for rideshare has not changed. Rideshare platforms charge more or less based on the starting point for the ride, as if miles in some areas did not cost as much to drive as miles in others.

On the last part, the lifetime percentage of my income that comes from tips as I type this, is 5.78%. (6.99% in 2022. Better!) Compare that to the 15 to 20% that is the historic norm in major cities for cab drivers, then come on back and tell me how nefarious rideshare drivers are.

Some of this is just tipping being easier to avoid in a cashless society, but still. A social contract was broken when we moved from cabs to rideshare, and it was not broken on the behalf of drivers.

And yes, I always tip my rideshare driver, as I do any waitstaff, and as any decent human being in America should do. I also try really hard to not tell myself the story that the vast majority of my passengers are indecent human beings.

3) Passengers have, and take, other options. They walk, ride bicycles, take buses and trains, call a cab, call a friend or relative they did not otherwise want to inconvenience, and maybe figure out some other plan for the next time that this kind of situation arises. The idea that a rideshare driver is their only possible option, and that the driver should feel guilt for wanting to make more and/or not doing the job whenever they want to stop doing it… um, F*** and No.

Do I engage in tactics to increase my pay? Of course. You would if you were driving as well. This isn’t a charity service, and the rapid rise in gasoline costs in the past three months has entirely come out of the driver’s pocket. If you are wondering why it’s so hard to find a driver, um, that. Drivers can do math. We can also find other things to do with our time when the math is not good. If you want us to work when it’s not very good economically, well… some of us will, especially if we don’t have other options. But we are going to find other options. With a quickness. And hey, presto, surge pricing. Go yell at the people who sell gasoline if you want to talk about how much things “should” cost.

I don’t want to come off as hostile or unfriendly about this. I do a lot of extra stuff for passengers all the time, and the data proves it – never in jeopardy of delisting, very few complaints over five years and 21K+ rides given, lots of deep compliments and the occasional Best Driver Ever remark – but at the end of the day, um, 5.78%.

If a journalist wants to start their piece from the point of view of how the customer is always right and the customer should never pay more…

Well, quick question for them.

How much were they paid for the article, and how much *should* it have cost?

Petty But Awful

That's Not A Good Sign

If you are a rideshare driver, you go through a lot of toll booths. It's a mild bummer to the job, as the reimbursement doesn't quite match the hassle of capital flight through your account, but so be it. Sometimes you can avoid them by knowing about other routes (the Trenton area, where I work most often, has several bridges to Pennsylvania that are small and free), but other times, it is what it is.

The New Jersey Turnpike, on the other hand, is way more expensive, and usually more avoidable. Until it really isn't -- most often when you have to take it to get to the fare in the first place.

Passengers do not pay, or at the very least, do not pay the full amount, until they are in the car. If you cancel in the first few minutes, I get nothing.