Challenges Faced by a Rideshare Driver Everyday

Rideshare cab rides are great. They are fun, fast and most importantly, affordable. All it takes to avail one is the click of a button on your smartphone, and a rideshare cab will be standing at your doors in no more than a few minutes. An even more fantastic concept is that of carpool (Uberpool, Lyft Line) rideshare cab rides. The most significant selling point is that they are even cheaper than regular rideshare cab rides, plus you also get to make new friends! Just select the destination from your phone and the TNC service charts a route for you automatically that takes into account other passengers going in the same general direction as you.

It means you get to save a lot of time as well as money. But what we, as customers often fail to acknowledge is the fact that there’s always one person who is making all of this possible for us, and working hard to make our rides smooth, and that is our driver. While we may fail to notice this, often engrossed in our travels, the drivers are sometimes having a hard time too.

Unreliable Technology
Rideshare cab rides are primarily dependent on GPS for efficient traveling. A lot of times customers avail rideshare cabs to areas that might not be well known to the driver, in which case they’re solely dependent on the GPS for navigation. Unfortunately, GPS requires being connected to the network consistently at all times. While the wireless networks used by TNCs are usually pretty reliable, glitches are bound to happen. And when they do, drivers are often left in the dark as far as navigation is concerned. This type of issue usually leads to agitated passengers.

Longer Rides with No Returns
A lot of times rides take you into areas that you haven’t been to before. And occasionally these trips end up taking you so much into the interiors or far from your usual route that you find it a hassle to return to your typical location directly. When this happens, more often than not your return trips are entirely free and without any passengers or ride requests, which means you’ve effectively wasted a lot of time and fuel for nothing.

While destination filters are a healthy respite from such problems, occasionally even they stop working efficiently and lead you off track.

Location Destination Mismatch
One of the most frustrating problems that are pretty commonly faced by drivers is that of customers entering the wrong destination in the app. It almost always leads to issues as when the ride leads them to a location they don’t recognize; they either start blaming the driver or ask him to navigate to the correct destination, which he now has to do entirely on his own since the GPS stops as soon as reaching the final destination.

Riders Making Music Demands
While this may seem like a trivial issue, it may sometimes lead to problems for the driver. Customers need to understand that drivers are not actually obliged to play the music demanded by customers. Obliging requests for playing something special is never a problem until a passenger is exceptionally rude about it. All in all, while it’s okay for customers to request for music, making demands is never polite.

Pickups With No Parking Space
More often than not, while waiting for rideshare cabs, customers choose to stand or remain in areas that may be convenient, yet they fail to take into account or acknowledge the lack of any decent parking space in the vicinity. It means that as the rideshare cab arrives, the driver has to struggle to find a suitable parking spot for the passenger to board the vehicle and may even lead to trouble with the authorities.

Arrogant Passengers
While this holds true for anyone who deals with customers on a daily basis, the struggle is even more pronounced for rideshare cab drivers. Rude or arrogant passengers often refuse to comply to even the most basic of requests. For example, an unusually rough passenger will just refuse to walk towards a destination that is only a few steps away and will demand to be driven there, even though the ride has officially ended.

Waiting For Passengers
Another issue that prevails and ails drivers is when customers don’t step out of their homes even after the rideshare cab has been standing on their doors for quite some time. While waiting for a few minutes is never an issue, but it does become a hassle when these few minutes turn into half an hour or more of just waiting.

Indecisive Passengers
When dealing with customers, drivers are trained to be calm for all kinds of situations. But if there’s one situation that they can’t be ready for is when the customers themselves are not sure where they need to go. While this may sound strange or even bizarre to some people, it is a more common occurrence than you’d think. Often, after getting inside the rideshare cab, customers struggle to agree upon a destination. For example, not being able to decide which restaurant they want to go. While it does not lead to losses on the part of the driver in any way, it sure is quite a frustrating experience to have.

While these are some of the critical issues that plague drivers in rideshare cabs, they are probably not all of them. There are still more problems that drivers have to go through, and while different drivers have different methods of dealing with issues, their end goal remains the same, which is to ensure a smooth and satisfactory ride for you, the customer. So perhaps the next time you take a rideshare cab, you will have little more respect and a lot more heart for the person sitting behind the wheel.