Driven to distraction
UBER DRIVERS HAVE BECOME SLAVES TO THE EARLY MORNING SURGE IN TRAFFIC
very weekday at 5:30am Uziel Santos, 48, leaves for work. Like most drivers for ride-hailing apps in New York, he is drawn by early-morning surge prices, and those closest to his home in Astoria, Queens, are on the upper East Side of Manhattan, where children and parents book short, lucrative rides to school and work.
He simultaneously signs on to Uber, Lyft and Juno, three of the most prominent ridehailing apps operating in the city, to determine the highestpaying fares in town that day.
Having memorised the promotions that various apps announce at the beginning of each week, Santos quickly scans for daily or even hourly surges and determines which app has the most profitable deal. Uber would bring him nearly twice the fare that a yellow cab would charge on a recent morning.
“It’s like a weather forecast,” Santos said. “You learn to predict when people need rides, and where.”
Ride-hailing apps established surge prices to lure drivers to areas with more requests than available cars. Capitalising on New York’s hypersensitive surge market, drivers use two or three phones per app, or even supplementary apps like Driver Bar and Uber Partner that are designed to help them find the best rates offered among the various apps and to log off apps when accepting rides on others. Santos became the sole earner for his family of four when he began driving for Uber two years ago. Uber Technologies Inc arrived in the city in 2011, promising drivers flexible scheduling and high wages, intending to disrupt “the most sophisticated and complicated transportation market out there”.
Yellow cabs
Lyft and Juno soon followed, and by last January, there were more than 60,000 cars registered with ride-hailing apps, far outnumbering the city’s 13,000 yellow cabs. Uber leads the market with more than 226,000 unique trips per day, more than 150,000 more than any of its competitors. For some longtime cabbies like Domingo Batista, who has been driving a yellow taxi in Manhattan for 20 years, Uber did not seem like a big deal at first. But surge pricing “changed everything,” he said, pointing to his fare meter.
“In the cab, that number’s not going up; Uber can surcharge what they want,” he said, adding, “Yes, it’s very unfair.” Santos switched to Uber after seeing ads on buses, betting that his profits could soar if he rose through the app’s algorithm to achieve a perfect five-star rating from customers. (He is at 4.98.)
To achieve this, he packs his squeaky-clean Honda Odyssey minivan with refreshments, snacks and magazines. He wears a suit and opens the door for each passenger, as if he were a chauffeur. He has become his own boss, adding Lyft, Juno and Via to his roster of apps for when Uber surges are not high enough. His maintenance routine, which includes gas and weekly wash for the van, costs from $300 to $400 each week, he estimates.
Within five months, the app upgraded Santos to Uber VIP, meaning more rides, priority airport bookings and better promotions for him every week. He said he had been earning about $6,000 a month since. In New York, Uber drivers earn $25 to $30 an hour on average (twice that of cab drivers and $5 to $10 more on average than Uber drivers earn in other US cities). But there is a downside to being your own boss: To turn a profit, drivers must plan their schedules around early-morning and late-night surges and invest as much as half their earnings in insurance and car maintenance.
An even bleaker future is on the horizon: The Uber driver may ultimately be replaced by driverless cars. (Uber’s first self-driving test took place in Pittsburgh in September.)
And with some apps doubling or nearly tripling the commission they take from drivers for each trip, drivers have to work longer and often during less-convenient times to make up the difference. (Uber took 10 per cent when it was introduced; now it takes 25 per cent, as does Lyft.)
“My friends don’t like their corporate jobs because there’s no flexibility,” Santos said. “So they say, ‘Maybe we’ll do Uber part-time instead.’”
He said he discouraged the change: “I tell them, ‘No way. You’ll lose money. There are so many expenses — maintenance, insurance, liability, the TLC licence, gas. And the only time you make real money is on surge — so you will miss family dinner and putting the kids to bed.’”
“But that’s the only way,” he added. “You have to treat it like an intense full-time job.”
Coalition
To address these concerns, a coalition of New York City drivers and a regional branch of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers founded the Independent Drivers Guild in May.
Sohail Rana, 48, who drives for Uber and joined the guild in July, believes apps had made drivers “slaves to the surges.”
“We’re like sitting ducks,” said Rana, who started driving for UberBlack, the company’s high-end service, after business slowed for the private black car company he worked for, a downturn he attributed to the ride-hailing apps.
Drivers for UberBlack, which account for 6 per cent of all Uber business in the city, by contrast, now earn about $33 per hour, he said. After expenses, Rana added, that amount was closer to $15 per hour.
According to James Conigliaro Jr, a founder of the guild, the 45,000 Uber drivers represented in the city are the victims of a “global bait-andswitch,” in which apps like Uber lure drivers with attractive fares only to extract everlarger commissions and invest in driverless technology.
For the moment, though, an app driver is forced to chase the surge. On New Year’s Eve, usually the most bankable time for a driver in the city, Santos was home with the flu. He had missed two weeks of driving to take care of his children, then himself and his wife. “In times like these, we pull out of the savings,” his wife, Ana, said. “He’s going to have to work a lot more nights to make it up. The kids cry. They ask me, ‘Where’s Daddy?’ because he’s not there in the mornings when they wake up and at night when they go to bed.
“But if he can pick them up from school, if he can stay home when they get sick — that flexibility is insurance in itself. For us as a family, it’s worth it.”