Uber: Work when you want!

A lot of people ask me how long I've been “doing Uber?” I explain that I drove a taxi in Pensacola for the last eight years, and then a couple of months ago switched over to Uber. Invariably, one of the next questions is how I like making my own schedule...working when I want? And I laugh. Uber seems to have convinced people that they invented this, “Work when you want” stuff.

They didn't.

I don't know of many cabdrivers in this or any other city who are required to work certain hours. Yes, when I drove a cab for a big company in New York City I had to choose a particular 12-hour shift, mainly because there was another driver who'd be driving “opposite” me. But even there, owner-operators can make their own schedule. Uber's, ”Be your own boss! Work when you want!” come-on is simply laughable. Pretty much any cabdriver can do that. The difference is that with Uber you're using your own personal vehicle as a taxi instead of a car that's set-up, metered and branded for that specific purpose.

But the reality is that for taxi drivers here in Pensacola, “work when you want” means working weekends because that's when the Navy and Marine guys and gals can get off base. There is “some” airport business (but it's dying as customers switch over to ride-share). There is virtually zero hailing of a taxi at the curb, not even downtown on weekend nights anymore. Almost all taxi trips are radio-dispatched. Finally there is “some” street business (e.g. home-to-Walmart), mostly handled by Yellow and recent upstart Lucky Cab. Even these trips are radio-dispatched.

And here we must speak delicately. You must have a credit card to use these “ride-share” services. (Although apparently Lyft allows customers to use pre-paid credit cards.) But there will always be a segment of society who either does not have a credit card, or who doesn't want to share that information with some big company. There are people who, for whatever reason simply want (or need) to pay cash for their taxi ride. Thus, Yellow and Lucky Cab still thrive. And probably always will.

Such trips are usually in the...well...let's say “less-affluent” parts of town. At the cab company with which I was most recently associated, when a trip would come over the radio with a pickup in a known...ahem...bad area, nobody would bid on it. At night, if a driver picked up a fare and indicated (by code) that the destination was “sketchy,” another driver (or two – whoever was free and in the area) would quickly rendezvous with the original car at the destination, or prior if possible.

The joke is that in the ghetto, taxis are called, “rolling ATM's.” People know we have money for the taking. So guess who wouldn't take any trips originating in the ghetto? Right, me. Call me racist...whatever. I may have mentioned before that not long ago a Yellow Cab driver I know was robbed at gunpoint and stuffed in the trunk of her car. The female accomplice kept telling her boyfriend, “Shoot her! Shoot her!” But the boyfriend did not, thank God. (They were both caught, thanks to the dashcam Yellow installed in all their cabs.)

Okay, I kind of got off on a tangent there. The point is that driving for Uber is a wonderful change from driving a taxi. There are pluses and minuses, like everything. For me, for now, the advantages outweigh the negatives.

I worried that my revenue-per-mile would be drastically worse with Uber, but so far that has not proven to be the case. I'm making about the same amount of money I was making driving a “regular” taxi, but I work less hours to do that. The best thing about working for Uber is that I can be sitting in my house, writing crap on the internet with the Uber app on (like now), and I can get a trip without having to drive a single mile.

I wish I could've done that in my taxi.