So-called ‘ridesharing’
Drivers
Fig. 1. Yeah, this is me. The sign says, “If you’re whining about a labor shortage, STOP ignoring my job applications!” And the QR-code leads here. Photograph by author, January 16, 2023.
I’ve talked to a few passengers now and from what they say they’re paying Uber, versus what Uber is paying me, it very much looks like Uber is taking something like a sixty percent cut of each fare. This is up from twenty-five or thirty percent when I first started with Lyft in 2016 and Uber in 2017. Drivers need to cover their operating costs from and somehow live on the forty percent they’re leaving us and the numbers flatly don’t work out.
At the same time, passengers believe they’re paying a little more, so it’s no wonder Uber has been hiding passenger payments from drivers.[1] And all this is consistent with previous reporting.[2]
- [1]Yujie Zhou, “Uber is hiding customer payments from drivers. Again,” Mission Local, November 16, 2022, https://missionlocal.org/2022/11/uber-hiding-customer-payments-from-drivers/↩
- [2]Dhruv Mehrotra and Aaron Gordon, “Uber And Lyft Take A Lot More From Drivers Than They Say,” Jalopnik, August 26, 2019, https://jalopnik.com/uber-and-lyft-take-a-lot-more-from-drivers-than-they-sa-1837450373; Faiz Siddiqui, “You may be paying more for Uber, but drivers aren’t getting their cut of the fare hike,” Washington Post, June 9, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/09/uber-lyft-drivers-price-hike/↩