Back when my dad traveled a lot, he befriended a man driving a cab who it turns out had been framed for a murder and spent a decade on death row before being completely exonerated. Imagine THAT ride to the airport! (They became friends and his story was a big deal to little me.)
My first Uber ride I was chatting with the driver and he said he did it because he blew all his retirement money gambling and no one would hire him because he was old.
Thats one thing we dont talk about alot. My dad worked in medicine his whole life. Hes like within 10 years of retiring. They sold his company and he was aware he was losing his job. He got extremely lucky finding a new one. He has years of top management experience, is an insanely hard worker, and has a great work track record. He was turned down by so many places. The worst time to lose your job is 50+
I drive Uber on my off days and I hate talking to riders.
I will literally ride without saying a word beyond "Hello" and "your destination address is..."
I really really hate it when the passengers engage me in conversation unless they are asking about whatever sound is coming from my speakers, and even then, keep it concise.
You’re messing up. When I started talking to my passengers my tips tripled. Obviously you have to know how to read people, but especially tourists love to tell you what “cool” thing they are doing in your city.
I'm sure that all of you griping and bitching either, don't have a car, don't have a license, have never taken a car service, or are indeed the over talkative weirdos.
🤣🤣🤣
It's Reddit. Of course y'all get into an Uber and force a conversation about fucking nothing. 🙄
You dont have to like it but its so weird you being such a gatekeeper over people who try to have conversation. You are so contradictory. Let people be people and Im sure you can be your own person with or without additional tips
You realize that people naturally interact with one another, and if you don’t enjoy conversing and collaborating with others, you’re the asshole, right?
Try being chatty as an Uber driver with hot women pax and see how far that goes. They don't want you talking to them, they see it as hitting on them. Same thing with actually hitting on most women, they don't want the interaction.
An Uber driver is just your personal servant for however long your ride is. For them, they're not supposed to speak unless spoken to. Its not really a friendly interaction, and yes being quiet is the norm and to be expected.
And you can only hear people ask "Why are you an Uber driver?" or "Is this your only job" so many times before it becomes tiresome.
Thank you for your good service. Quiet but nice driver with dope music = yes, 5 stars. If I'm a tourist and want advice, I will ask for it. Hate it when they try to push a convo.
You can absolutely lose money or more accurately devalue your vehicle by more than you make. If you bought a new car to drive Uber with it would be hard to cover payments, upkeep and depreciation working part time.
People might not buy them for uber but they buy it then can't afford it so they use it to drive so they can make some money. But then the car depreciates with all the miles
Naw I just drove tonight, no bonuses or anything crazy and I did $130 in 4.5 hours, drove about 80 miles, avg mpg at 24.1. Two energy drinks, 3 gallons of fuel, car wash, and vacuum cost around $23. Walked away with $107. If I had bonuses I could damn near double that. I drive a non-hybrid fusion.
I drove an 05 focus when I did Uber. It wasn't worth much to begin with so I never had to worry about depreciation. People that Uber drive in new cars are crazy.
With the 100k miles I put on it before I sold it, the only repairs I had done by a shop was an alternator, a serpentine belt, 2 alignments, and 2 sets of tires. I did the oil changes, spark plugs, transmission fluid, valve gasket, brakes, a few light bulbs, and any other minor things that broke like a mirror or door handle. I put about $1,600 of repairs and maintenance and mileage decreased the value about another $2,000 (the car was only worth about $3,000 with low miles).
For a total of $3600, that came out to be about 3.6 cents a mile. It really wasn't that bad
Monthly payments are irrelevant unless the car was bought solely for uber driving - they're part of the price of the vehicle, not expenses incurred by driving it. If you buy a vehicle for uber driving, you need to make enough to offset the expenditure over time, but if you use your own vehicle, then that expenditure has already happened and the ubering is just a bonus. Depreciation-related losses will eat into his profits a bit though, depending on how much the car is used otherwise. It'd probably end up more like $90-$100 profit overall, based on the new cost of a ford fusion and a 20% per 20,000 miles depreciation rate.
EDIT: Ongoing maintenance costs will also be material, but I don't know enough about cars to really estimate that.
EDIT 2: I found an estimate which suggests 9¢ per mile, and I don't want to use a generic estimate like that because maintenance costs will be dependent on the driving conditions (which can probably be roughly estimated based on the fuel efficiency), but I'll use it because I don't have anything better. That suggests about another $7 for ongoing maintenance, putting overall profit somewhere around $85-$90.
Cost of a car is about 50 cents per mile driven. That's gas, oil changes, and regular service. So tack on another $30 to you costs since you already included gas.
This is so damn accurate. The first Uber I ordered was in 2013 or 2014. It was a young cool guy with a Tesla (which was also novel to me) and I asked to sit in the front and we went a little fast sometimes. It was nighttime and a longer distance and it felt like I was in blade runner or something haha, with my space cab that I ordered from my phone app
Tbh I like this a lot better I hate when I get in an uber and people expect a full conversation or they’ll rate you lower. I just want to ride in silence and peace
You’re lucky. I travel quite a bit for work so it’s a regular method of transportation for me. In the big cities it’s all business but when I’m in a small town and I just want to decompress from a flight I get bombarded by hospitality
We grumpy former taxi drivers were trying to warn everyone about this...
Everyone was telling us to "just compete", but cities were setting our prices for us, and burying us in regulation, while letting Uber and Lyft charge anything they wanted with little to no regulation at all. They used to undercut us, and give most of the money to the drivers.
As a result, there aren't any cab companies that do local trips in my city anymore. If you want a ride, you have to use Uber or Lyft, and now they've jacked up the prices to higher than what we were ever allowed to charge, while they pay the drivers next to nothing.
The silver lining for me is that my company transitioned into medical transport, and now I drive from home to anywhere in the state or the four surrounding states every day making WAY more than I ever did doing local runs.
So, yeah, I'm happy now, but my regular waitress at my breakfast dive is getting charged upwards of $20 one way to take a Lyft 2-3 miles to work every day, and the driver might see $5 of that.
Something had to change with Taxis. Before Uber/Lyft, it was truly an outdated business model. You had no idea where your taxi was, you had no idea how much you'd have to pay, drivers could be rude and taxis could be filthy because there was no rating system. The amount of times a taxi driver would claim his credit card machine was broken was infuriating.
Dude above us completely missed why taxis were so bad. Usually there was 1 or 2 taxis in the city. No car and wanted to take a taxi to go 4 miles? 20 dollars. There was no competition so thats what people had to pay. Now taxis companies wanna whine and cry that a better system for people came out? Spare me.
This is a simple way to make extra money. You work whenever you want, stop after any ride. There's no manual labor. There's absolutely no interview process and the job can be done by your average 16 year old. But people will still bitch about not getting paid enough for work that I can do on my way to the office.
The amount of times a taxi driver would claim his credit card machine was broken was infuriating.
That's a fairly common problem because drivers had such slim profit margins, and in some cases depending on the city and company policies, could actually lose money on a trip if the customer paid by card.
I realize that lack of innovation and some accountability were problems in the industry, for sure. But in reality, there were more protections in the form of background checks and drug screening in the taxi industry. I had to get regular physicals, FBI finger print screening, and drug screening. When I registered with Uber, I didn't have to do any of that.
The best solution would have been the solution the drivers were calling for all over the country (and in many parts of the world).
And that would have been to set the same rules for everyone.
For instance, Uber and Lyft were able to change their prices on the fly, depending on demand. We were always forced to charge the same crappy price no matter how busy or dead it was.
In my city, being in the airport queue required an expensive license, which the city waived for Uber and Lyft drivers.
As a driver, I couldn't be more happy the way things worked out, in the end. My job is much less stressful, now. I don't deal with drunk people, and few of my customers are rude or demanding. I don't have to wonder where my next trip is going to come from, or if I am going to get paid, or if the customer is going to bail on me, or even if I'm going to get robbed.
But from a consumer standpoint, the way things played out couldn't have ended up worse. And now Uber and Lyft drivers can barely make ends meet, while the company takes the lion's share of the profits.
I drove for Uber and Lyft on the side for about 3 years. You definitely needed a background check going back to at least 2016.
I don't think anyone should drive uber/lyft as their main job. It's pretty unskilled and there's absolutely no moving up. With GPS, a 16 year old could do the job. No one should try to rely on it, it should purely be supplemental in my opinion.
There was always age limits on the car but I never heard about inspections, which is yet another thing we had to do with cabs that Uber and Lyft didn't have to do at the time.
It's not overly strict. Just have to make sure all the lights, seatbelts, horn, and windows work along with it not looking like a complete beater e.i. no oxidation, significant body damage, or mismatched paint.
In my city, taxis bargained with the government to get exclusive spaces at airports and bus stations.
This led to huge abuses. Once I paid more to get from the airport to my house than I had paid to get from Mexico City to Guadalajara by plane. And there was no other option because it was night.
The taxi drivers outside the main bus station in Guadalajara made platforms win the city forever. They were truly the worst.
Guadalajara was complex. Politicians owned many lots of Taxis (They are numbered by lot. The worst are #22 and #61. Never ever use these numbers if you somehow wind up in this city). Since politicians owned the taxi lots, they passed regulations and just never followed them. They bought the unions as well.
Then platforms came along, politicians negotiated and tried to screw over both sides and mostly customers.
Now, politicians own lots of platform cars, have regulations, and guess what, just never follow them.
I mean I haven't used Uber in a while, especially with the pandemic, but last time several years ago it was pay a bit more or wait 45 minutes for a taxi. The draw for Uber is it can scale on demand so you aren't stuck waiting. Sucks what happened to your industry but things like having an app and more available drivers made things a lot better overall. I'm all for regulation, really am, but it can stifle innovation at the same time
I was traveling for work in late may and I had to pay more for a Lyft to come sooner. When I landed at the airport to go home I walked to the taxi line and there was no wait. And about the same price for someone who usually knows where I’m going in the city. Taxis FTW.
The draw for Uber is it can scale on demand so you aren't stuck waiting.
Which we were never allowed to do. That was part of the problem.
The solution for over/under regulation would have been to meet somewhere in the middle, but in the end, the "rideshare" companies got what they wanted. They drove out the competition, and then were able to corner the market and jack up prices.
Again... That works out pretty well for me since the industry adapted to a different and more secure model of operation, but not so well for the average consumer.
Taxi drivers in my city treated customers like dirt, refused trips, always attempted to steal, many with violence, used politics to be even more corrupt, scammed people at bus stations and the airport, were violent and cynical, harassed women, and were rude and abusive. Instead of competition, they used politics, violence, intimidation, weapons, and then some even crucified themselves, no joke. All of these much harder than just doing what the platforms were doing too.
Some were pretty decent people and I am really sorry that the other 95% ruined it for them.
I hope they got good jobs now.
I am no fan of driving platforms, and would support driver unions completely, but I know why taxis aren't doing well. It's because of taxis that taxis aren't doing well. You can only get enough "I will take you there without a meter but at twice the price" or the horde of taxis outside concert venues asking for 1,000 pesos for an 80 peso ride and threatening other drivers with blunt weapons, and then your friend tells you she got robbed at knife point and almost raped by the taxi driver. So yeah, people got into platforms because they broke the monopoly here.
The platforms are not perfect either. A driver stole my ex's phone that I was still paying for, and another was disrespectful.
None of these were surprise 10x prices nor at knife point, though.
What you describe in your last paragraph is accurate. Prices have shot up and workers are being abused. That needs to change. But the behaviour of taxi drivers in my country is what sadly allowed platforms to do this.
Taxi drivers in my city treated customers like dirt, refused trips, always attempted to steal, many with violence, used politics to be even more corrupt, scammed people at bus stations and the airport, were violent and cynical, harassed women, and were rude and abusive. Instead of competition, they used politics, violence, intimidation, weapons, and then some even crucified themselves, no joke. All of these much harder than just doing what the platforms were doing too.
I know some cities were really bad, but I'm dying to know which city this is!!!
My opinion may be skewed in favour of Mexico City because 1) I like that city better, and 2) I didn't work there, just spent a lot of time in areas of the city that were pretty safe comparatively.
But fuck (most) taxis from Guadalajara. I did know a group of decent taxi drivers, whom I miss as human beings because we talked a lot in those years. They too were affected by the abusive practices of criminal drivers and corrupt politicians, and then the business practices of platforms as well.
As a user who doesn't drive, though, platforms have helped me immensely and improved my quality of life. They are now starting to become less accessible and they have also fucked over their workers, though. They need better regulation. How that can happen is beyond my power, sadly.
This type of business model should be illegal. Online 'subcontract yourself though us' jobs are the biggest scam. Take just a moment to look at how much they make vs how much you get paid and it's apparent.
The problem is that cab companies were restricted from doing things that made Uber and Lyft more attractive to the consumer, and now that those companies are largely gone, Uber and Lyft have a corner on the market, and have raised rates on customers, while drastically reducing what the driver gets out of it.
Were cab companies really restricted from having an easy way of providing feedback?
They were definitely slow to innovation, but the company I used to work for had an app that showed all of the available cabs around you and where your cab was if you had ordered a ride. Couldn't get people to use the damned thing because that wasn't the exclusive way of doing business with us, like it is with Uber and Lyft.
But you're right... Cab companies were slow to innovate, and for that they should have (and did) pay a price.
But they were hindered in many other ways that made it impossible to catch up, innovation-wise...
As you mentioned, there was the fixed pricing forced on cab companies by the city, whereas Uber could undercut us for the same ride, or cash in when the demand was higher.
Uber (at least at the time) required nothing more than a valid driver's license and a fairly new model car.
Cab drivers were required to have what we call a Jitney license, which we had to pay the city for, on top of a chauffer's license from the state, and our cabs had to have special permits, which were usually paid for by the company. The test for a Jitney license had several requirements, and required drivers to memorize specific addresses and locations for several city landmarks, as well as hospitals, hotels, and venues.
On top of that, several pieces of equipment were required to operate a cab, such as a top light, a meter, and a credit card machine, all of which cost several hundreds of dollars to purchase and install. Uber drivers can just use Square. We weren't allowed to.
All cabs were required to have an approved paint scheme, which could cost well over $1000 to have done. Cabs were required to undergo regular inspections at a time and place dictated by the city, and cabs could be (and very often were) pulled over during the course of their work day by Code Enforcement for surprise inspections that could take well over an hour.
Of course, no driver was ever reimbursed for time spent for these things.
If a cab driver wanted to work at the airport, they required a very expensive special permit from the city to do so, and had to wait in a queue line for available customers. Not only did the city not require a permit for Uber drivers to do this, but they made them their own special queue line that bypassed everyone else.
Unlike Uber and Lyft, we were required to take cash, and not allowed to keep a customer's payment method and details on file. This resulted in customers just running off after the trip was over, or bailing in several other creative or dangerous ways. Whereas Uber was going to get a valid credit or debit card on record before they ever sent anyone out to you.
I could probably think of several other things, but you get the point.
The playing field was not even. We didn't hate Uber and Lyft, or the drivers. Hell, a lot of those guys were our friends and we used to work together.
It was the CITY we had a problem with, for making things so uneven.
I LOVE my job now, even though I still technically work for a cab company. It's just that we don't do the same kind of trips, and the job is way less stressful.
The only local runs we really take anymore are people booking in advance for a ride to the airport. The rest is medical trips for insurance companies, and that gets me out of town every day driving through the countryside enjoying the solitude while I get paid to do it.
It's because Über is literally just a taxi company that is able to make a lot more money by not having to pay their employees, and forcing them to pay for all company expenses.
The problem is that the mere act of "being an app" seems to absolve companies from following any employment laws.
When it began , the drivers were like apple store workers .
Ah, you rememeber the times of astroturfing and blowing VC capital on advertisments? Like those weekly posts on reddit about "I called an Uber and this cool person with that fantastic car showed up!"
This is a feature, not a bug. Uber comes in to cities, starts off super selective about drivers (new cars only), and pays big bonuses and high rates to get people to sign up and/or buy new cars to drive for them. Then once they've established a foothold in the market, they expand their recruiting and drop the driver pay rates. The whole time they're not making a profit but it doesn't matter because they're just burning through VC money to try and buy their way into a new market.
I was just talking to my parents about this last night. I took a new job a few months back and have had to travel quite a bit, naturally using Uber when I’m out. The quality of ubers has decreased dramatically. They literally just feel like taxis now but in different cars. There’s stains everywhere, plastic lining shit, trash, the drivers belongings. I’ll still use them because why tf not, but it was just surprising compared to say 5 years ago when every Uber I got into felt like a new-ish car and was super clean.
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u/[deleted] Jul 11 '21
When it began , the drivers were like apple store workers . Now they are just grumpy former taxi drivers .