Aka Uber and Lift no longer available in Mass.

I have no sympothy for Uber and Lyft.

I used to work for an old school traditional taxi service. Back in 2003-2007. Back before these services took over. I had a personal issue with my employer, and so I left that company. I knew everything there was to know about the office side of taxi dispatching. I was going to find something else for the moment (which happened to be a laundromat attendent, as well as a hotel front desk manager), but in a different comany, run by different people, I could have become office manager of a taxi business.

Then uber and lyft came in.

They set their fares at unreasonably cheap rates. They made no profit for the first 8 years. They made the customers get used to the idea of fares being so low, just to drive the other traditional companies out of business. But here’s the thing. They were bleeding money, that they made up for with other investments. A taxi company is in no other investing business. So it worked. All the other taxi companies in my area went out of business. Except for the one I used to work at, because they secured private contracts with the airport and schools. Other than that one company, 8 other taxi companies died.

Then, when everybody else was dead, Uber and Lyft raised rates DRASTICALLY in our area. We have a small suburb in Cleveland, named Lakewood. It’s basically the shape of a rectangle. About 4 miles east to west, and 2 miles north to south. You could go anywhere in Lakewood, for $4.50 when I worked for the Taxi company. It’s generally about 10 minutes one side to the other unless traffic backs up. I’ve seen those fares are now $12.75 before tip, and the drivers only really make money from the tips. There are 2 main roads in lakewood, both going east to west. Detroit is the more main of the roads, it has the number 26 bus that runs it’s entire length. The other main road is Madison. The number 25 bus runs it’s full length as well. You can either get an all day pass for 5 dollars, which gives you unlimited rides on any bus throughout the entire Cleveland bus system (RTA), or you can pay $2.50 per ride. No matter which bus you take, anywhere else in Lakewood is a short walk from where you got off at your stop. Less then a 2 minute walk I’d say. Even walking north to south, Detroit to Madison is a 5 minute walk. So you could even take the wrong bus, get off paralell to where you’d get off on the other bus, and still only walk 7-10 minutes.

So you can see how this would scale when you apply it to all of north east ohio. That same $5 bus pass will take you about 40 miles one end of RTA to the other. Our old taxi rates would have been in the neighborhood of $40-60. Depending on point A and point B’s distance. Uber I’ve heard will charge $200 for that same distance. When they first came to town, they were charging $10. Just to drive taxi’s out of business.

When I worked at the taxi company, you knew the drivers. It really felt like a TV show some days. You knew what certain people were going to do, what certain people were going to say, before they even walked through the door. During the bar rush (busiest time of the week for taxi’s), they’d collectively fight the other taxi’s trying to steal our orders, however if the customer called BOTH companies, BOTH companies would collectively leave his ass on the curb for intentionally wasting one of the drivers time. There wasn’t full unity between competing companies drivers, but there was an understanding that they work together on some things. A taxi driver knew the city. A taxi driver knew the events. A taxi driver got a sense of who the passengers were by reading body language before they even said a word, and was prepared for trouble before it came.

These Uber/Lyft drivers are none of that.

“Take me to (insert the most well known street in your city)” “Ok, where is that?”

or “I’m going to (insert really well known concert venue)” “Yeah, I’m going to need an address”.

I don’t know if this is still true, but when I was working as dispatch, I would hear about how in London you couldn’t even work at a taxi company, driver or dispatcher unless you passed a test of the local street knowledge, and local landmarks. You needed to know where every street in the city was, within 45 seconds of being asked, or you fail. I always thought that was pretty neat. Knowledgeable professional drivers.

Now you get into these Ubers, and the guy is like “Yo, bro, ya mind if I vape???”. Zero knowledge of the city. Most of them only doing it one day a week. Despite having a preset price, they take the most random longest routes, because they rely on GPS.

So Uber and Lyft have tried to basically manipulate the system for an outcome that benefits their own corporate interests only. They don’t give a shit about the drivers. The drivers don’t even know each other. There’s no sense of unity or pride like we had. It’s all lowest common denominator bullshit, except for the price gouging, 90% of which goes straight to corporate.

So now the customer pays far more, to get a lesser quality driver, and the ride will take longer because the driver doesn’t know what they’re doing, and the drivers aren’t getting compensated enough to make this an actual job.

I have no sympathy for Uber/Lyft.

If you have a job providing transportation, then you are on-call, whether you’re transporting customers or not. And you should be paid for BEING on-call. This is a standard practice in several industries.

As someone who did uber and lyft, let me tell you that these algorithm are exceptionally fine tuned to meet $/hr over long term driving. In my area, it is tuned to hit close to 20/hr ± 4 dollars/hr. You bet that on some trips uber is taking larger percentage vs other trips to meet this target. This is clearly how their system works to squeeze every dollar out of both drivers and clients.

Note: this is with OR without doing promotions and specials.

Those algorithms will try their best to get you out of profitable areas and stick you with low pay rides once you pass this 20/hr threshold. Especially if you are doing promotions, as they know that you will more than likely meet this target $/hr mark.

That’s a fair bit of money, I’m impressed.

Damn that’s a lot