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Mike says he has mastered the art of Uber driving. "I don’t think there's anything anyone can teach me," he tells me, sitting at a tiny table near Groove lounge, a hangout for on-demand drivers in San Francisco. "I've figured it out over time, just by being a savvy individual. Not everyone is."
He started driving for a ride-hailing app called Sidecar in 2012. Nowadays, speeding through the streets of the city, he juggles rides for multiple services, including Uber, Lyft, and more. The 32-year-old says he makes $30 to $50 an hour, significantly more than the average of $19 per hour in fares, according to a study commissioned by Uber.
He calls his fellow drivers "unintelligent." Most, he says, "have no clue what they’re doing." But, calling himself an ex-racecar driver, he admits to pushing the limits, driving with a certain recklessness as he moves from customer to customer and app to app. "I don’t drive during slow times when a lot of people are driving," says Mike, who declined to be identified by his full name, for fear of retaliation by the ride-hailing companies he drives for. "I know the city. I get through the town faster than anyone else can do it."
Yet as much as Mike badmouths other drivers, here he is at Groove, spending his free time with them.
Groove fills one corner of an open-air food truck park, beside a highway overpass on 11th street, in San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood. There are some wooden tables and benches, an old school bus with a few other places to sit, a restroom trailer, and Skeeball. It's a place where Uber and Lyft drivers can make pit stops or take a break. They can nap, get coffee, freshen up. But they can also socialize and commiserate and trade advice. These drivers need each other, including Mike.
For most of us, Uber and Lyft and Sidecar are apps that instantly hail a car. Press a button on your phone, a car arrives and takes you where you want to go. It's remarkably efficient system. Yet it's easy to forget that this efficiency depends not on a staff of salaried drivers, but on a world of individuals constantly struggling to understand---and adapt to---the challenges and difficulties unique to being an on-demand driver. Most drivers prize the flexibility of making their own hours, of being their own boss, versus working for some faceless corporation. But at the same time, they're grappling with a new type of economy. Some think they've cracked it. But cracking it isn't easy. And it's always changing.
According to Uber's study, its drivers can work less and make more per hour than taxi drivers. But at Groove, many other drivers paint a different picture. Just when some drivers think they've mastered the system, their revenues may drop significantly. More and more people are now driving for Uber, Lyft, Sidecar, and others (in New York, there are now more Ubers than taxi medallions, according to data released by the Taxi and Limousine Commission in March), and as these companies compete for riders and mindshare, the available money is far from constant. "The frustration comes with the lack of predictability," says John, another driver based in the San Francisco Bay Area who asked that we not use his last name, not wanting his employer to know he was driving on the side.
What's more, as independent contractors, these drivers don't get health insurance or other benefits from Uber and its competitors. "If [drivers] get sick or hurt, and can't drive, they're in a real bind," John says. Uber recently launched a magazine for drivers, offering various tips and tricks of the trade, and the company says it will help drivers finance their cars. But some have argued that the terms of its finance program burden drivers with subprime loans that could be inflating a bubble in the auto market. Others are annoyed that the company is marketing the program to people with bad or no credit. (Uber declined to be interviewed for this story, supplying a statement instead. "Uber is always adding new ways to enhance driver opportunity," it reads in part. "Driver-partners have the ability to grow successful small businesses or supplement their income with the freedom, flexibility, and economic opportunity.")
Unhappy with existing conditions, drivers have staged strikes and protests in both physical (picketing) and the digital worlds (organized blackouts where drivers shut off their phones). And two lawsuits are pushing to classify drivers as employees rather than independent contractors, so that they'll receive benefits, reimbursements, and other protections.
Uber and Lyft argue that since the drivers have certain freedoms most employees don't enjoy, like setting their own hours for work, they shouldn't officially be considered employees. And this battle for the future of ride-hailing is only just getting started. But in the meantime, workers are pushing for other remedies. Groove is a prime example. In multiple ways, it aims to change the future for these drivers. "We, the driver base, are creating our own facilities and our own technologies that meets our needs and helps us make more money," says Groove co-founder Manny Bamfo.
Bamfo says Groove was inspired by the time he spent with drivers while at Hitch, a carpooling service that Lyft acquired last year for an undisclosed amount. Some said that while driving for Uber, they had tried to use the restroom at at the company's headquarters---and were unceremoniously escorted out. On some level, he says, you can't blame Uber. "These companies have hundreds of thousands of drivers. They can’t manage it all." But if Uber can't manage them, they need a way of managing themselves.
Groove offers a restroom that's open around the clock. And a place to rest without driving all the way home. But it's also a place to find others like you. "You can meet other drivers at Groove, and you can feel safe," says Bamfo. "At night, Safeway no longer has to be your abode."
After chatting with Mike, I find myself surrounded by several other drivers, including another early Sidecar driver named Lori Kober, a Lyft driver named Matt Earnest, and a guy named Jonah Price, who once worked for Breeze, a company that leases cars for drivers. When Lori gives her name, Jonah perks up. "I’ve known your name for years, and I’ve never actually met you!" he tells her. I ask how he knows Lori, and all three drivers respond in unison. "Facebook," they say.
For years, they explain, drivers have operated private Facebook groups where they trade stories, tips, and tricks. "There’s just a lot of stuff in there where we talk about passengers that we wouldn’t want published," Jonah says. "It’s people venting and others saying: 'Oh, I’ve dealt with that. Here’s how you prepare for it next time.'" Now, at Groove, they can move this into the real world.
When Jonah mentions zip-lock puke bags, Lori gets interested. "I’ve never had that happen," she says.
"Oh, I have hospital vomit bags," Jonah responds.
"The blue ones with the little ring on it? Those actually hold up well?"
"I finally had to break one out recently. I’ve handed them to people before but one time I got this guy, and he finally used it. And as soon as he committed the deed, he passed out. We got to his place and he gets out of the car and he goes: 'This is my house! How did we get here? Did you drive me here?'"
Laughter and nods all around. And as the evening goes on, they continue to trade war stories, tips and tricks, discussing car financing programs, insurance, and taxes.
In the end, such advice goes only so far. As much as they enjoy Groove---and as much these conversations help them in practical ways---this gathering is far from a critical mass. In the grand scheme of things, few drivers hang out at the lounge. And because Uber drivers aren't legally employees, they don't have the right to organize with the protections and privileges that most labor unions have.
During one "global day of protest" arranged for Uber workers last October 22, there were still plenty of vehicles available in New York and San Francisco, according to reports. "There are so many people who are doing this part-time, and they don’t care about the politics," Matt says. "They just want to make an extra buck so they can take their girlfriend to Vegas. There’s not enough people who are committed."
Enrico Moretti, a labor economist at UC Berkeley, says the overall effect of these services is still positive. "There's a new flexibility for people who are doing this as a second job, and for women with children who can only work a fraction of the day," he says. But at least some drivers believe they should have more options, and with Groove, that's what Bamfo is trying to provide.
He wants to open these lounges in other cities, attract more drivers, and partner with other startups that help these drivers. Recently, Bamfo says, Groove partnered with a new sponsor, Intuit, purveyor of the tax filing tool TurboTax, to educate drivers on the best way to do taxes.
What's more, he hopes to create new technologies that can flip the system. Bamfo doesn't elaborate on how it works exactly, but he says Groove has created apps that optimize things for drivers, not just for the Ubers of the world. "At the end of the day, the apps are a dispatch system, and they tell drivers where to go if it’s in their best interest," he says. "There needs to be a system that optimizes where drivers go that puts the driver first."
The question is how well that would work. As much as Bamfo believes in the power of the technology to change the system, this seems unlikely. It's one small solution to give drivers a new way to connect but, after all, there are so many other problems they deal with. As we chat in Bamfo's Groove lounge, Mike dismisses Bamfo's tech idea out of hand. The Uber universe just doesn't work that way. "You can’t solve the problem with technology, because even if you can see where the surge is happening---which you already can---you just have to know which streets will get you to the surge area twice as fast," Mike says. "And you can’t account for awesome driving skills, which I have."
UPDATE 04/01/2015 7:13 PM EST: The story has been updated to clarify that there are currently more Ubers than there are taxi medallions in New York. Previously, the story said that Ubers outnumbered cabs, but each medallion can represent more than one cab.
