I have noticed a dramatic increase in drivers

Drivers Advice, Experiences
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#1

There seems to be about twenty regular drivers working a good bit who are mostly local. If I had to guess there are 4 or 5 times the number of drivers here Thursday through Saturday. You are right about Blacksburg being smaller, but I would assume it has the same rhythm of this college town.

I do see evidence of students driving here. The guarantees and surges seem to be drawing in people from Lewistown, Williamsport, Altoona, tyrone, Philipsburg, I’ve heard of people coming in from farther than that. The Buffalo game was a dud. No way they had the business to keep all those cars moving, particularly Thursday evening. Rutgers was a different story. Because the two weekends were so radically different, my guess is that whether or not a driver did or didn’t take the guarantee, it might have been a wash either way. Hard to say. Not even sure a local Uber driver would know what to make of it.

#2

You are correct, working for a week without sleeping you may make $1200. Let’s see… 1200/168 = $7.14 per hour. $7.14 per hour is about what an average UberX driver nets.

#3

So in theory, some UberX drivers could make $1200 in a week. But let’s be serious, the driver is going to need to stop and eat occasionally, although maybe he gets his food when a client stops at Jack In the Box at 3AM.

#4

I did extremely well last week…Over 40 hours though, probably 45 actually driving, 50.5 online with Lyft. To hit 1200 I would have had to have done the bar closings, which I just won’t do because I do not want to carless for two days because of barf. I get enough drunks 11-1am.

#5

Personally, I, as a P/T driver, can say that driving for music festivals in your area whenever possible will yield high earnings. My first weekend driving for UberX was the same weekend as the California Roots Festival in Monterey, CA - my payout was $936.88 (and that had a $50 deduction for the phone I was renting from Uber).

#6

Your profile says you have done over 4,000 trips and driven 100,000 miles. How many smokes/mile is that? That is a lot of mileage for 4,000 trips… What did it work out to in terms of quarts of oil and tips/year?

#7

First of all, Blacksburg is $1.50 per mile. Uber is working on over saturating your market to get rates down under $1.00. Have your Plan B ready when that happens in the near future.

#8

Couldn’t figure out how to insert the screen shot, but as you can see, o u r surges are huge. I don’t see them onboarding enough drivers any time soon to compensate for this. This week was about 600 total miles

#9

Uber is doing the same thing here in State College. They routinely surge. The surge seems to be capped at 3x, but the base rate is even higher than Blacksburg. People are coming from all over the state to drive weekends. I have heard rumor of people being shipped in to drive from out of state, but I couldn’t confirm that myself.

#10

Uber is also offering rather generous guarantees here. They offered one easy enough to satisfy guarantee spaning the first two football weekends here. I can’t imagine it didn’t create conflict. That first weekend was way quiet. The guarantee started on a Thursday. The town was littered with UberX on every corner. You could see the cars sitting. I don’t work Thursdays, but I heard all the taxi companies were dead too. Friday and Sat of that first football weekend sucked too.

#11

A smart Uber driver would have felt he or she made the right decision to opt in for the guarantee. They wouldn’t have beat it that weekend. The second weekend of the two weekend guarantee was entirely different. It was balls to the wall busy. I would assume an Uber driver easily could have beaten the promise.

#12

What is the difference between the top 40 and bottom 40 markets in terms of $/mile? Maturity. NYC being an example of a rare exception. His car was nice and only kind of new, sort of. It wasn’t so much as new as not old. Not old yet.

#13

Roanoke drivers definitely come down here to drive bur it’s about 45 minutes and miles so if they do it during the week, they’re idiots. I’ve definitely seen a decrease in available cars Sunday through Wednesday.

#14

Blacksburg is much smaller than state college, I used to deliver pizza at gumbys up there, so we have a much smaller pool of drivers. That’s why so many are shipped in from Roanoke. I can’t see many college kids wanting to give up their weekend nights to do this once they turn 21, and th [se who do will graduate and move on after graduation.