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It was a big news week for all of the major players in the ridesharing industry this week, including Bird/Lime and a brand new ridesharing platform, inDriver. Senior RSG contributor John Ince covers all that, plus NYC’s minimum pay wage for Uber and Lyft drivers, below.
After our last article on driving in bigger vs. smaller cities, we received several emails asking us to cover rideshare driving from a small town driver’s point of view. Today, we have that article for you! Reader Chris (he’s asked us to withhold where he lives, for reasons you’ll read below) shares his guest post with us today on what it’s like driving in a small town, why he does it, and the challenges small town drivers face.
We’re always looking for other drivers’ perspectives on driving! If you have driving tips or perspective you haven’t seen on RSG, contact us here and if picked, you’ll get a $100 Amazon Gift card!
I signed up with Uber in October of 2016 and Lyft shortly after in December of 2016. After I signed up, I drove in a city of 320,000 people (Lexington, KY) that had a major university, horse racing track, tons of bars, breweries, and distilleries. That city is approximately 25 miles and 35 minutes from my home.
Every night that I wanted to work, I had to deadhead to city center, then do the same on the way home. Using data I compiled in the first half of 2017, I averaged about 14 rides per day that I worked, at a net profit of $9/hour.
With Uber’s recent announcement of Uber Pro (a driver loyalty rewards program), we expected to see Lyft announce new features designed to help drivers, too. We were not disappointed! Senior RSG contributor Jay Cradeur breaks down all the latest driver enhancements Lyft has rolled out (and continues to roll out) over the next few weeks.
Recently, Uber came out with a driver loyalty rewards program called Uber Pro. It assigned drivers one of four classifications (Partner, Gold, Platinum and Diamond) and rewarded the drivers based on their earned classification.
But now its Lyft’s turn! Lyft is launching several new features for drivers before the end of 2018 and below, I’m going to present the new features and give some feedback on their value and usability.
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How many drivers can say they’ve given 24,000 rides – all on one platform? In this episode, senior RSG contributor Christian Perea interviews a driver who’s not only given 24k+ rides, but has also served on Lyft’s Driver Advisory Council and who runs a popular daily email newsletter for his fellow drivers. You won’t want to miss his tips for drivers!
If you’d like to read a transcript of this podcast, please click here.
Would you rent out your vehicle to another rideshare driver? For drivers who have an extra vehicle, don’t want to or can’t rideshare drive at the moment, or for those who just want to make some extra cash with their unused vehicle, Hyrecar can be a great option. But what’s it like renting your car out to strangers? RSG contributor Paula Gibbins details her experience renting her car out on Hyrecar here (affiliate link)
HyreCar is not a new concept, but it was new to the Minneapolis/St. Paul area as of May 2018. My husband, Adam, had signed up to be notified as soon as it was available in our area because we wanted to test it out. Passive income is always a great thing in our opinion, so we wanted to see if this would be worthwhile.
For a little background, HyreCar is a service where people who own cars can put them up for rent, typically by Lyft and Uber drivers who don’t have cars that they can use or who don’t want to put the wear and tear on their own vehicles. So, those drivers rely on people like my husband and I to be willing to let them drive our cars.
