the uberverse

So, you know how sometimes you’re fifty-seven years old, career canceled, unemployed for a year, with dwindling life savings and no prospects to restock them? And so you’re just relaxing in a lavender bubble bath playing Yahtzee on your iPhone, ignoring reality, when you remember that link a Lyft driver texted you three months ago? 

You’ll make $1,900 if you give 120 rides within the first thirty days! Guaranteed! No application! No humiliating confession of your shameful past! Just sign up and cha-ching!! So, you figure: what the fuck? Why not? I mean, you need the money; it’s not like you’re sitting on a stack of cash. You know what I’m talking about? Right, well, that’s how rideshare started for me, too. 

Just one week later, on my first day, I met Zara. That encounter excavated a spacious chamber in my soul that I’d forgotten existed. I wanted more. A month later, I signed up for Uber. Since then, I’ve given around 3,000 rides.

There is more to “the Uberverse,” I’ve learned, than poetry and wonder. I’m not talking about the sensational things you may have read about. It’s not the passengers but the industry’s business model that sometimes erodes the capacity for presence and connection I rediscovered on my ride with Zara. Since I’ve found that most people don’t know how rideshare works from the driver’s side of the app, I think an explanation would be helpful.

We rideshare drivers don’t work for Uber or Lyft. We’re self-employed. When we sign up to drive, the companies sell us access to their driver apps and pool of potential riders. Passengers pay their fares through the app directly to Uber or Lyft. The companies keep a percentage of that base fare as payment for my access to the app, to cover their expenses, and to make a profit. We get what is left over, which seems to vary from 30 to 50% of whatever the rider has paid. 

I pay for all overhead costs, such as gas, insurance, and vehicle maintenance. Once all this is considered, I take home about $12 an hour from these base fares. This is $3 less than the minimum wage in Massachusetts. But since I’m self-employed, rideshare companies don’t have to ensure I earn minimum wage or any wage at all. Moreover, because I’m self-employed, from that $12, I have to set aside money for income and social security taxes. Ultimately, my take-home pay from base fares is a little under $10 an hour. 

There are two ways to compensate for the shortfall: tips and bonuses. I always feel grateful for any tip. But tips are infrequent and unpredictable. In my case, only about a third of passengers have tipped anything at all. My service has little influence over this. Of course, I’m courteous and respectful and a safe driver. But beyond this, I provide amenities such as bottled water, phone chargers, snacks, poems, and a guestbook to make the rides more comfortable, enjoyable, and human. They appreciate this and tell me so, often enthusiastically. And 99.9 % of my riders have given me the top rating of 5 stars. But most haven’t expressed their gratitude with a tip. So, while tips help, they’re not a dependable source of additional income.

This brings me to bonuses. On Uber, bonuses come in three primary forms: “Surges,” “Boosts,” and “Quests” (Lyft has a similar structure). As the names suggest, “Surges” and “Boosts” are short-term opportunities to earn a few extra dollars per ride under specific, unpredictable, and highly variable conditions. They are, therefore, also undependable. 

“Quests” at first glance appear more promising. They are weekly rewards for completing a specific number of trips within a longer fixed period—for example, $90 for completing 60 rides between Friday and Sunday. Here’s the catch: I live and drive in the Connecticut River Valley in Western Massachusetts, a beautiful area dotted with small, widely dispersed towns connected by rural routes that typically meander among mountains and winding waterways. But this same setting makes for extended pick-ups and long rides. My average ride (including pick-up and drop) takes about 30 minutes. That means that to complete a 60-ride Quest, I would need to drive for thirty hours of my weekend. And that assumes that I take no breaks and that there are no lulls in demand.

For Quests to be worthwhile, I need quick rides with short pickup times. To select such rides, I need to know the pickup and ride duration for an incoming request. But to get that information, I must first ascend to one of the higher driver tiers and stay there. And to do that, I must accept at least 85% of my ride requests. Thus, even once I have access to the information I need, I can’t necessarily use it to pick short rides because my acceptance rate will drop, and I’ll lose access to the information entirely. In the end, even Quests prove unreliable. 

Overall, the rideshare industry’s pay structure works like the vending machine that only sometimes delivers your favorite snack: it pisses you off, but because it sometimes works, it’s hard to give up on it.

More concretely, I don’t like what I’ve noticed happens to me when I’m lured into playing their incentive games. First, my attention turns from the present to the immediate future: How many more rides do I have to go? Are things about to heat up? Related to this, my wonderfully complex human mind reduces itself to a shitty calculator: How long will the next ride take? At this rate, how much longer will I have to drive to finish the Quest? Then, as factors almost entirely beyond my control frustrate my newborn expectations of efficiency, a wild, whitewater tumult of infantile craving and frustration overwhelms me. By the end of such days, even when I’ve completed the Quest, I feel no elation and little sense of accomplishment, just resentment, isolation and emptiness. I feel as though I stopped existing as a person for the duration of the Quest, as though those minutes and hours of my life just somehow vanished, as though I’d blacked out.

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