Imagine the United States as a flat board with every person the same weight. The point where the board would balance is the "center of population." In 1790 it was near Baltimore. Over 230 years it moved 877 miles west and 128 miles south, to the Missouri Ozarks. The Census Bureau finds this point every 10 years.
I ran a small experiment a couple of weeks ago while driving for Uber, and it says something useful about decision-making that goes well beyond an airport parking lot.
After dropping a fare at the airport (the nominal rates were about $28/hr and $0.97/mile), I had a choice: leave immediately and drive back empty, or wait in the staging lot for the next dispatch. I gave it two hours, roughly the round trip home and back, to see how long it takes for a decent offer to show up.
It took two hours to confirm what I already suspected. The offers that came in were either a few short trips around the airport (about $0.70-0.80ish/mi) or long ones (20-30 miles at around $0.60-0.65/mi), well below my preferred rate, the kind of offers that Uber and Lyft typically throw at you, mainly because someone with not much criteria will take them. I turned them down and drove back the way I had come, with nothing to show for it except some numbers.
Those numbers turned out to be worth more than they looked. I later pulled 33,000+ real offers from the same market and ran the actual math, and it confirmed what the two hours had already told me for free: the expensive part was never the wait itself, it was not knowing in advance whether the wait would pay off.
The next few posts will walk us through that math, which turned out less forgiving than either "always take the airport run" or "never take the airport run" would suggest. If you don't want to wait for the next few days of posts, the full breakdown is already up on the Cherryfy blog. There is also an interactive calculator there, for anyone curious enough to want to play around with it.
I went on a three-day weekend and forgot to take my charger with me. The watch started with 100% on Friday at 8am and still had about 9% battery left when I got back home after 60 hours.
If drivers think only high dollar value, long drives are worth accepting, you're in for a shock.
Cherryfy shows you what you really stand to make, once you take into account your fuel and long term costs of driving your vehicle. In some more egregious cases, you're actually paying to drive for Uber.
Over the last month, Uber offers have been averaging $0.93/mile in Houston. Cherryfy has kept me ahead by helping me average $1.11/mile. In other words, for the 3,197 miles I drove, I made an extra $607 compared to what I would have made if I had clicked on everything Uber offers to me without avoiding the offers marked red by Cherryfy.
Generally, I just laugh it off (inside my head) but today I picked up somebody named Wife and I had two contrasting thoughts running through my head:
Anyway, it was a short 5-minute drive so I didn't dwell on this question for too long, except for thinking that it might be an interesting question for the sub. So, what do you think when you pick up someone with an unusual or unexpected name?
Just looking at my dashboard metrics from the past month. Honestly, the offers in my area are usually pretty bad—most averages sit well under a dollar per mile on any normal day.
The only major outliers on my heatmap grid are those massive red and orange blocks from last month when the World Cup was in town. Outside of that surge, it's mostly garbage.
Despite that, my overall gross average is holding reasonably steady at $1.13 per mile. The only reason it stays up there is because I’ve been aggressively declining the terrible trips. According to my quality distribution chart, 73% of everything Uber and Lyft throw my way is a straight-up poor offer.
I just let the timer run out on those and only hit accept when a good or decent fair offer pops up. It's tedious, but filtering out the noise is the only way to make the numbers make sense. Analytics are from Cherryfy, my cherry picking app.
Yesterday I came across a post here that asked if people that use their pickup trucks actually make profit. So my first question was: what is profit? Different people define it differently. For me, for example, it means (1) getting at least $1/mile in gross income, including deadhead miles, AND (2) cross a minimum daily threshold of total gross income in dollars. So, what is your definition of "profit"? What makes you happy after a session of driving?
Someone asked in another post, how much can an Uber driver make, driving full time. Since I couldn't add a pic to my comment, I thought I'd share my numbers as a separate post. These are over the last 3 weeks or so, since I started adding my daily sessions to my app. The numbers are obviously not brag-worthy but, rather, give a real sense of the type of money you can make, if you do this full time and cherry pick the offers.
The location is Houston, TX, and I drive Uber X.
I am very excited give you a preview of some new features coming to you soon and hope they make Cherryfy even more useful to you! To make Cherryfy a full-featured app - one on which users can depend not only to see whether the offers they get on their devices are worth accepting, but also to manage their rideshare financials - we are working on adding driving sessions to the platform.
When you start a session, Cherryfy will ask for your starting mileage. When you finish, it will ask for your ending mileage, income, and any expenses incurred during that shift. You can add multiple sessions per day, or, if you prefer, log your mileage on the road and input your income and expenses when you get home. The system is designed to be highly flexible.
After logging a few days or weeks of sessions, you will start seeing your trends. Simply log into your dashboard on the website using the same phone number you use for the app. Your data is completely secured, ensuring that only you can view it. Visual cards will display your average rates, gross earnings, and net income after expenses. You can even account for estimated future maintenance and repair expenses based on your vehicle's type, year, and total mileage.
Drivers in the US will see an estimated tax liability (both with and without the IRS standard mileage deduction), helping them set aside money each week for future tax payments. The dashboard also tracks tips, cash, bonuses, and how your income varies over time, alongside many other key metrics.
These features are currently undergoing rigorous road testing to iron out the kinks, after which they will be opened to everyone. I really do hope you will try them out.
This is a scientifically proven evidence. Found this Durant shirt in Ross. Last year I found a Jalen Green shirt in Ross during the summer months and he was gone by the time the new season rolled around.
(Edit: I realize now I should have used the /s because so many people just take anything on Internet quite literally! My fault.)
I did got two trips after 3 hours of wait but it felt like such a waste of time. This is one of the two offers - looks like a great one but if you take out the $40 boost, the actual offer is quite shitty at $23.77 for 40+ miles.
Anyway, here is a link to my cherry picking app, Cherryfy, that gave me that banner on top showing the per hour and per mile rates.
No info on how much is the pay, how far I have to drive? Wtf?!
I hope the admins will not remove this post - after all this is good for you, the drivers that make this sub possible.
On Friday I announced that Google Play Store has accepted Cherryfy, my app to help drivers like you and me help separate the good Lyft and Uber offers from the bad and the borderline ones. Last night I designed an admin page on the website, https://cherryfy.app, to see where my users are located and this is what I saw: twenty three states in the US and one in Canada. My app is also being used in Hawaii! I still don't have anyone in Mexico but I'm sure, as word gets out, I'll start getting users there too.
As the title says. I had been using the test numbers for several months now as I went through testing. However, for the last couple of days I've been getting "Verification Failed. This number is not allowed. This maybe because...". I even tried using a new test number, I have the +1 country code in the number.
Has anyone seen this before?
Lyft couches this as "having heard from" us but:
It takes 30% before deductions (fees, insurance, etc). The deductions now come out of the remaining 70%. Before this change, the deductions used to come out of the passenger payment. The new policy takes these out of the 70% of the remaining, leaving us with even less as a percent of passenger payment;
The adjustments are monthly now. Before this they were weekly so, if you had a bad week, the adjustments may partially make up for it. Now your bad weeks will be cancelled out by your good weeks, so your adjustments will be reduced.
The rapaciousness of the gig companies knows no bounds and they want us to think that they are doing us a big favor by making these changes.
I mean in the sense of chemistry and playing together. Just look at the assist number and individual shot numbers - everyone played, everyone tried, and everyone scored - there was no one dominant player. Overall, one unselfish team and two good wins so far.
