The smell of wine and cheap perfume
I created a group on Facebook for people who drive for Uber and/or Lyft driver in and around the Hagerstown area of Maryland. It’s small, but it should grow as more drivers find out about it.
The purpose of the group is to share information and get to know the people doing the same thing in the same area.
I’ve tried to drive for both Uber and Lyft. When I get a request for one, I try to go offline on the other. Evidently Lyft is running a special in western Maryland that gives riders five dollars off their first twenty rides. This should cause an increase in requests for Lyft rides. Sometimes I does. Last week I made more money from Lyft than I did Uber. Sometimes it doesn’t as Lyft seems to have problems connecting to me.
I logged into both apps this morning, the Uber driver app and the Lyft driver app. I got a constant string of text messages from Lyft:
Because Lyft will not let you be logged into both the driver app and the rider app at the same time, I cannot look at the rider app to see if Lyft can still see me. With Uber, I can go into their rider app and make sure that my location dot is sitting squarely in one of the car icons.
Every time I get one of these text messages from Lyft, I go offline and then back online. A few minutes go by and I get another text message. It’s annoying.
I don’t know what the problem is. I don’t know if it’s somehow caused by both the Uber rider and driver app being up and running of it’s just a problem with Lyft’s network. To test it further, I guess I’d need to log out of both Uber apps and use only Lyft. I don’t really want to do that.
Yesterday I picked up a couple from one of the restaurants at the Valley Mall. I was logged into both Uber and Lyft. They were using Uber. During our conversation, one of them mentioned that they took Lyft to the restaurant. I asked why then they used Uber for the return trip. She told me that when she looked at Lyft, there weren’t any cars available.
Even though I was logged into Lyft, the rider app showed there were no cars available.
Whatever is going on with Lyft here in the Hagerstown area, it’s not worth the hassle or frustration. Until it gets sorted out, I’m sticking to just Uber.
In my quest to find out if I can make any kind of living driving for Uber, I completed my first whole week of driving for the ride share company. When I refer to a week, I’m referring to a traditional work week, Monday through Friday. Here’s a snapshot of my week:
I was logged into the Uber app available to accept rides for almost 21 hours. I accepted 16 ride requests and earned close to $262 for my effort. That works out to be around $12.47 an hour, more than I could earn stocking shelves at Walmart. One huge difference between driving for Uber and getting a low-paying conventional job is I will end up paying very little in taxes on the money I earned this week. The reason? The amount I can deduct for mileage this week.
From the moment you leave your driveway to begin driving for Uber to the moment you drop off your last passenger and return home, your mileage is tax-deductible. The IRS allows you to deduct $0.535 per business mile driven. Not only can you deduct the mileage someone is in your car, but you can deduct the mileage you drive in between rides when you are looking for a place to park were there are no other Uber drivers around. When waiting for a new ride request, I often fire up the Uber passenger app and try to find areas around Hagerstown where none of my fellow Uber drivers are waiting. When I see such a spot, I drive there and park.
I can deduct those miles too.
This past week with Uber, I drove a total of 527 miles. That means I can deduct $259 from the $262 Uber will be paying me. That results in a total of $3 in taxable income for the week.
That doesn’t include the gas I spent this week. I burned gas not only driving, but sitting in park waiting for a ride. There were days it was in the 90’s and I had to run the air conditioning while parked. It also don’t doesn’t factor in the so-called wear and tear I put on my vehicle. It is what it is. Most of the conventional jobs I’ve had required me to commute. I burned a lot of gas commuting to those jobs. I put a lot of wear and tear on my vehicles commuting to those jobs.
Again, it is what it is. I had fun driving for Uber this week. I got to meet people I’ve never met before and I had some great conversations with most of them. For me, there’s real value in that.
My goal for next week is to do better than this week. I should be able to log in with Uber for more than 21 hours next week.
Uber rolled out a new methodology for paying drivers. Before Monday, driver pay composed of the base fare added to the per minute fare and then added per mile fare. Uber then totalled this amount up and then subtracted 25%, Uber’s cut. The driver got the rest.
Here in Hagerstown, this worked out to be the following:
$1.50 base fare
$0.15 per minute
$1.10 per mile
This meant that a 10 mile trip that took 15 minutes earned the driver $11.06. This amount was calculated using the following numbers:
Since yesterday, Uber stopped taking a percentage. Instead, Uber just lowered the fares 25%. Since Monday, the rates here in Hagerstown are the following:
$1.13 base fare
$0.1125 per minute
$0.825 per mile
The same hypothetical 10 mile trip that took 15 minutes calculates to the following:
See how much easier this is? It’s the same amount. The amount of pay has not changed. It’s just easier to figure out than it was before. The formula is now smaller and more simple. The problem is, some Uber drivers see that their base fare, their per minute fare, and their per mile fare has decreased and they assume that this means they are now making less money.
They’re not. They’re making the same.
It’s actually somewhat embarrassing. Some Uber drivers are even trying to organize a movement to have their fellow Uber drivers delete their app. One of these drivers is YouTube vlogger Randy Shear, also known as Uber Man.
Even though Uber Man’s entire video persona is tied deeply to the Uber Man identity, he’s encouraging drivers to ditch Uber and start driving only for Lyft. This seems insane. Lyft appears to pay drivers the same amount Uber pays its drivers. They do here in Hagerstown and everywhere else I’ve compared the two rideshare services. What’s the point of switching?
Uber Man is also a paid spokesman for Mystro, an Android app that allows drivers to stay logged in to both Uber and Lyft at the same time. Once a driver gets a request from one of the rideshare services, Mystro automatically logs them out of the other.
By encouraging people to delete their Uber app and drive only for Lyft, I’m not sure how great of a paid spokesman Uber Man is being for Mystro. And by that, I mean he’s being a terrible one.
Personally, I hope Hagerstown area Uber drivers take Uber Man’s advice and delete Uber. This would mean I wouldn’t have to wait so long between rides. The worst thing about driving for Uber is having to wait for rides. Less drivers in my area would mean less wait times.
Uber released last year’s profit and loss statement to Bloomberg News. It shows that they grossed $20 billion in fares for the year. Considering that Uber drivers, working as independent contractors, take 75% of fares, that would mean Uber should have netted $5 billion in profits based on fares last year. Instead, Uber made $6.5 billion in profit last year.
How can that be? Because Uber doesn’t split fares with drivers 75/25. Not really.
As an Uber driver in the Hagerstown area of Maryland, I make the following:
Uber then slices 25% off that total and then gives me the other 75%. But that’s not all of what Uber makes. They also charge the passenger a booking fee. That booking fee is not split with the driver. What is a booking fee? From Uber’s website:
The booking fee is a separate flat fee added to every trip that helps support safety initiatives for riders and drivers as well as other operational costs. Previously known as the safe rides fee, your booking fee will appear in your trip receipt.
As a driver, I cannot wait for those safety initiatives to kick in. It should be exciting to see what they are. I feel safer just thinking about it. I feel like someone put a helmet on my head, a mint flavored mouth piece in my mouth, and wrapped me in bubble wrap.
The booking fee in Hagerstown, Maryland is $2. It doesn’t matter how long the ride is, each rider pays a flat two bucks to be picked up in the Hagerstown area.
I was online with Uber for two hours and one minute on Wednesday. I got only one (1) ride request, and that was at the beginning of my shift. I took home $7.06 for the nine minute ride. According to the Uber’s fare calculator, the rider paid anywhere from $10 to $14. For most of the two hours and one minute, I was sitting in the Target parking lot reading the new John Scalzi novel on my Kindle. I had the windows down and there was a nice breeze going on. The book, The Collapsing Empire, is quite good. At least the first one hour and 45 minutes of it.
I actually enjoy driving for Uber. Most of the time that is. I just wish I spent more time driving and less time reading on my Kindle. I feel like Uber tries to saturate markets with new drivers. Instead of trying to retain the drivers it has, it’s always trying to sign new drivers. That’s why they are always offering new driver bonuses. On one hand, I can see why they do it. Uber never knows when it will have any number of drivers ready to pickup Uber riders. It’s not like we have shifts.
We work when we want to.
The Advanced WordPress Facebook group is changing the way it operates. The 28 Admins for the group took a vote and beginning April 17, an Admin must first approve a post before it appears in the group.
From Matt Cromwell’s blog, one of the moderators of Advanced WordPress Facebook group:
Every time a low-quality post gets posted to the group it adds to the noise, and sometimes it might be hours and hours or even a day until an Admin removes it — which means thousands of people have experienced the group with more “noise” than it should have.
If there’s a problem needing solved, I don’t see how this will do it. If it took “hours and hours or even a day” before an Admin could remove a low-quality post, how long will it take them to approve a post? What’s going to happen when one Admin thinks a post is low-quality, but another thinks it’s high-quality?
The vote to go all iron curtain wasn’t unanimous. There were Admins who voted against the change.
The group of 28 Admins don’t all think the same about things. If that were the case, the vote would have been unanimous.
This is dumb. The Advanced WordPress Facebook group is a Facebook group. Low-quality is the bread and butter of Facebook. People don’t go to Facebook for high-quality content. Noise is the ocean that Facebook swims in.
Having a discussion group where Admins must first approve posts sounds like a terrible user experience. I’d rather read the occasional bit of noise than have every post approved by a clique of 28 people.
I’m a member of this group. It has always struck me as being somewhat elitist. Why throw the word “Advanced” in the title? The discussions I read there never strike me as being all that advanced. Elitism has always been a real problem with WordPress. When you hear the term “WordPress community” it’s referring to a small clique of people who think they represent everyone using WordPress.
WordPress is just a web publishing platform. People use it because it’s currently the best web publishing platform available. Also, because it’s free. Once something better comes along, I expect people will flock to that. That’s the way it works. When I first started this blog, I was using Movable Type. WordPress came along and it seemed better. The same will happen to WordPress.
If enough people don’t like moderated Facebook discussion groups, I’m sure someone will create a new group. I’ve seen it happen before. There’s a local Facebook group called Whats [sic] Going on in Hagerstown. It was heavily moderated. Discussions were regularly deleted by one of the moderators because they personally didn’t like the topic. People got sick of it and a new group was created, What’s Really Going on in Hagerstown. If history is any indicator, the same with happen to the Advanced WordPress Facebook group.
