Some Uber drivers work dangerously long shifts

One morning late last year, Uber driver James Lindsey saw he had a chance to more than double his pay.

Instead of the $8 per hour average he had been making, the 48-year-old Provo, Utah, resident says rates jumped that day to $20 per hour for no apparent reason. To take advantage of it, he drove for 20 hours straight.

“I felt trapped,” Lindsey said in explaining his dangerously long shift. “I thought, ‘I might never see it this good again.’ ”

For some Uber drivers, long shifts have become the norm. Dropping fares and profitable incentives lure them to keep driving past safe limits.

Because the ride-hailing service doesn’t set a cap on how many hours its drivers can work at a time, there are few legal ways to stop them.

By contrast, rival Lyft shuts off its app, which drivers need to find customers, after 14 hours at a time and doesn’t let drivers back on for six hours to let them rest. As a result, the potential danger for Uber passengers and drivers alike continues to grow, even as efforts to limit driving hours spring up across the country.

“I’ve never come across Uber telling drivers how many hours they can work,” said Marvin Schulman, a Florida attorney who has represented traffic accident victims involving fatigued Uber drivers. “They can just drive around the clock.”

Dawn Gearhart, a policy coordinator for the App-Based Drivers Association, a Teamsters-affiliated group of Uber and Lyft drivers in a Seattle suburb, said she has heard complaints from “hundreds” of drivers who work up to 16 hours a day because of low pay or tempting incentives.

Gearhart said drivers receive notifications saying they aren’t picking up enough passengers and they need to take on more rides if they want to keep driving for Uber — which can happen even after a full day of work if drivers “consistently decline trip requests,” though it won’t lead to a permanent loss of their account, the company says. Others say that they’ll just do “one more trip” so that they can reach their monetary goal for the day as they are struggling to make enough for basic expenses like gas and car insurance.

“Drivers say, ‘everybody’s doing it,’ ” — that is, driving to the point of fatigue, Gearhart said. “It’s a shared experience.”

Uber says it investigates reports of fatigued drivers and takes “appropriate actions” in response.