An Uber driver waits for customers in his car in Beverly Hills, California. Photo by Lucy Nicholson/Reuters.
In just four years, Uber has constructed an intimidating profile. It operates in 4.
It services millions of customers and employs hundreds of thousands of drivers. In June, Uber snagged $1. Alison Griswold. Alison Griswold is a Slate staff writer covering business and economics.
Uber Says Its Drivers Make Great Money. But the Math Just Doesn’t Add Up. 'Why people hate taxis in Tampa Bay and love Uber and Lyft?' #1 Uber and Lyft are much cheaper #2 Drivers at Uber and Lyft are new to industry, without bad. Bill, you’re absolutely right. I have come to realize that there is some necessity for taxi/for-hire regulations to in some way limit the number of drivers to a. Footnotes 1 Bruce Schaller, 'New York City Taxicab Fact Book, 3rd Edition.' NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission, May 1994, page 1. 2 A 1994 survey conducted for the New. How Many Miles Does an Average Taxi Cab Driver Drive Yearly? Taxi drivers only make money when their car is on the road, and with approximately 232,300 taxi and.
That Uber has compiled such impressive numbers is fitting for a company that’s avowedly built on data. For all its talk of “ride- sharing,” Uber is essentially a for- hire car or taxi service like any other, but for one golden insight: how to make taxi- ing more efficient.
Using an algorithm of its own making, Uber has introduced drivers and customers to dynamic pricing—the idea that rides should cost more when demand is greater. In doing so, Uber has embraced the free market and systematically chipped away at inefficiencies in car services by bringing supply in line with demand. That algorithm—and the data that make it possible—underpins all of Uber’s successes; the company has staked its reputation on numbers.
Of all of Uber’s numbers, one is particularly important: $9. In a late- May post on its blog, Uber cited $9. Uber. X in New York City. Uber. X driver partners are small business entrepreneurs demonstrating across the country that being a driver is sustainable and profitable,” the company wrote. In contrast, the nation’s taxi drivers are often below the poverty line … so that wealthy taxi company owners can reap the benefits of drivers having no other option to make a living.” Uber was the heroic disrupter of those taxi companies, and $9. American dream—proof that contract workers in the so- called sharing economy could do much more than just make ends meet.
In recruiting drivers to its platform in New York and around the world, little has been more important than the glimmer of $9. Lately though, as fares have fallen and Uber’s own commissions increased, drivers have grown disillusioned with the company and its promises. From London to San Francisco to New York, they’ve banded together to protest against Uber. The rhetoric they once saw as uplifting now seems deceptive and manipulative. Slowly but surely, Uber drivers are questioning whether Uber’s promises about wages and “small business” opportunities are actually aligned with reality.
And in New York, the birthplace of this grass- roots labor movement, $9. The way Uber drivers see it, ride volume can only increase so much in response to lower prices. When I meet up with Uber. SUV driver Abdoulrahime Diallo at a Starbucks in Manhattan’s Flatiron District, it’s a Wednesday morning, but he has time to chat. Instead of scouring the busy streets for passengers, he and Jesus Garay, a driver for Uber.
Taxi Driver: Original Soundtrack Recording; No. Title Length; 1. 'Main Title' 2:15: 2. 'Thank God for the Rain' 1:58: 3. 'Cleaning the Cab' 1:05: 4. 'I Still Can't.
X, have turned off their Uber phones as part of a daylong strike over recent cuts to fares and alleged poor treatment by the company. In London, drivers are doing the same while in San Francisco and Los Angeles they’ve gathered at Uber headquarters to protest. Here in New York, Diallo and Garay are helping to coordinate the strike as organizers of a nascent group called the Uber Drivers Network. This is the latest in a series of recent protests against Uber. Over the summer, Uber lowered fares by 2. New York City taxi.” Drivers, they said, would benefit from increased demand, lower pickup times, and more trips per hour—factors that would more than offset a drop in prices.
T Magazine | The Knowledge, London’s Legendary Taxi-Driver Test, Puts Up a Fight in the Age of GPS. Emergency Action! Motorcade to Albany Wed, June 1st* Meet at 7:00 am outside Union office. Uber and Lyft are lobbying the state Assembly and Senate for a new. New York City has taxis all over the place. Everywhere you look, there is a yellow cab zooming down the road. The amount of taxi cabs in the city make sense, however. So I declined (when you get a request, you don’t know how far it is but you do see where it is on the map) my first request. There are a lot of college kids in the.
They’ll be making more than ever!” the company wrote on its blog. In late September, Uber announced that the experiment had been a success and that it was keeping the lower prices in place. Josh Mohrer, the general manager of Uber in New York City, tweeted on Wednesday that the average Uber driver in the city is netting $2. Drivers, so far, are inclined to disagree. They say it doesn’t hurt the pocket of the drivers,” Garay says of the 2.
It does. Because it’s impossible with those numbers to be in business.”The way drivers see it, ride volume can only increase so much in response to lower prices. Garay says that on average, a ride takes him 2. For a trip of that length, Garay says he’ll make $1. So if you’re busy, you’re going to make three rides in an hour,” he explains.
That’s $3. 0 an hour. That’s before commission, taxes, the Black Car Fund, before you take off your gas …”The costs that he’s talking about are ones that all drivers, as independent contractors for Uber and licensees of the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission, have to pay. New York is among Uber’s biggest markets and it offers those riders three different tiers of service: Uber. X (the cheapest), Uber. Black (the middle), and Uber. SUV (the most expensive). On each of these fares, Uber takes a commission: 2.
Uber. X, 2. 5 percent on Uber. Black, and 2. 8 percent on Uber. SUV. From that fare, the city also takes a sales tax of 8. Black Car Fund takes a fee of 2.
For a driver like Garay, all those deductions mean an initial $3. According to statements Garay provided Slate, he made $1,1.
Oct. 1. 3. From that, he took home just under $8. In any given week, Garay expects to lose a bit more than $3.
That leaves him with about $4. Effectively, he’s making $1. Twelve dollars an hour isn’t terrible. But it’s a far cry from the kind of numbers that Uber advertises to drivers on its platform—the numbers it uses to paint itself as empowering contract workers in the sharing economy. The statements themselves are also confusing. A diagram in Garay’s statement shows he worked 4.
He tells me it doesn’t make sense. The trick is that Uber is referring to two different kinds of hours: those spent online (available on the app) and those spent with actual customers in the car.
When drivers think about hours, they think about the first kind—hours spent on the app looking for rides. But when Uber breaks things down, it’s interested in the second—hours shepherding passengers. Uber and its drivers have fundamentally different notions of how drivers’ time and effort should be measured.
And as fare cuts have made profit margins slimmer all around, those differences have increasingly led to clashes. The founding members of the Uber Drivers Network met for the first time in May; in the months since, they’ve recruited others through word of mouth, social media, and printed fliers, and they’ve stirred up a handful of protests and strikes. The New York City branch of their Facebook group has more than 1,5.
Uber drivers. (Uber declined to confirm the number of drivers it has in the city, calling it “proprietary.”)As the drivers have banded together, a crucial question has emerged: In the sharing economy, in which a company like Uber serves primarily as the middleman between service buyer and service provider, who holds the true power? Thrown into the race without a clear answer, the three main companies in the field are using one of two strategies to build out their platforms. First, there is Uber’s: cut prices to please the consumer.
Lyft, another major player in the ride- sharing game, has operated similarly to Uber; the two are engaged in something of a race to the bottom to draw in customers (and Uber, at least, believes that race will also lead to more fares and more money overall for drivers). The third contestant, Gett, has taken a different approach: raise pay to please the driver. Drivers are crucial, obviously, to this equation,” says Ron Srebro, CEO of Gett USA.
You have nothing without customers, but you have nothing without drivers.” Two weeks ago, Gett announced that it would pay drivers on its platform a flat rate of $0. Uber and Lyft. So far, Uber is the clear leader in ride- sharing. Its reach is far more vast than that of its competitors, and its funding far greater. Whereas Gett and Lyft still feel like startups, Uber has acquired the air of inevitability associated with a massive corporation.
But it remains to be seen which company’s strategy will pay off in the long run. That’s what’s kind of interesting about this model,” says Wally Hopp, senior associate dean for faculty and research at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. It’s not clear which of those audiences—the customers or the workers—is most important to you.”In jockeying to win over consumers in particular, Hopp thinks companies like Uber and Lyft have veered away from their free market principles and artificially deflated fares. I think there are some underpriced rides out there, meaning you can do it for a little while, maybe burning through some of your venture capital or burning through some of your good will from the drivers,” Hopp says. Uber is not in a position to let their algorithm work and float prices to the market- clearing level, so they’re actually keeping prices below what the drivers want, in order to gain market share.”Uber might be leading the race now, but scoring $1. So is fielding repeated public accusations of using dirty tactics to sabotage competitors.
In Hopp’s estimation, the current jockeying can only last so long. He sees on- demand car services becoming a commodity, with fares and wages competed down to the lowest possible levels. One provider is going to be viable,” he says, “but two or three or four is not.”Considering how fast Uber has grown and changed—and the sheer number of people it employs—it doesn’t seem so odd that worker protests were in its future. But Lane Kasselman, Uber’s head of communications for the Americas, isn’t interested in discussing that. We look at it differently,” he tells me.
Drivers are our customers. They’re the ones that are licensing the software and—fundamentally from Uber—are getting regeneration and marketing, and getting small business tools.“We’re creating 5. Kasselman continues. Drivers are excited about the economic opportunity that’s happening.” I mention the previous Wednesday’s protest. There were no protesters in New York, Chicago, or D. C. at our offices, and literally only a handful in L. A. or San Francisco,” he says.
How Many Miles Does an Average Taxi Cab Driver Drive Yearly? Calculate the number of oil changes that a taxi driver reports on their tax return, and you can determine the estimated mileage they drive annually, according to the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS determined that they could used cab maintenance receipts to reconcile the miles actually driven. In the process, they learned that even repair bills without odometer readings could be used to estimate the amount of mileage driven. The 2. 00. 1 study of Los Angeles taxi drivers showed that mileage driven could be estimated from oil bills, as well as tire purchases, tune- ups, and other routine maintenance. For example, if 5 oil bills were submitted with fifteen oil changes performed at the recommended 3,0.