When Timothy Turer started working for ride-hailing app Lyft in 2016, making money was pretty straightforward.
Even short rides earned him $15 — which was often more than what riders were paying, Turer said. “They paid a fortune to the drivers in the beginning,” he said. “They had huge sign-up bonuses.”
“They gave you severely discounted rides that were paid for by venture capitalists,” he added.
Today, Turer has Elite status with Lyft — the highest-status tier that the company offers its drivers — and has completed roughly 11,000 rides for the app.
But like many gig economy workers who drive passengers or deliver groceries, he told Business Insider that it has gotten harder to make money as more people compete for riders.
In response, Turer said he’s had to get more selective about which jobs he takes. He no longer cruises busy parts of Southern Florida, for example, hoping to get a good-paying ride from a customer on demand.
Instead, he has a couple of ways of ensuring he picks up more profitable jobs.
One involves taking Lyft XL rides, which are designed to transport up to five passengers at once. Turer said that he bought an SUV as a used vehicle from a rental car company, qualifying him for XL rides.
In some parts of South Florida, “the XL is normally twice as much as a regular Lyft,” he said. Families going to or from a port before or after a cruise, for example, need larger vehicles than most Lyft drivers can provide.
Turer also takes a lot of scheduled rides. In South Florida, there’s no shortage of people who need to go to and from major airports, especially at odd hours, Turer says.
“I line up maybe five, six or so of them for the day, usually very early in the morning with the red-eye flights,” he told BI.
But those types of jobs do come with a catch: If a driver can’t make it to a scheduled ride on too many occasions, they can effectively lose the ability to take them again in the future.
Turer said he learned that the hard way this month when he was getting ready to pick someone up and realized his car battery was dead. He dropped the ride so that another driver could fetch the passenger.
Afterward, he found out that Lyft had issued him a “warning” curtailing his ability to take scheduled rides on the app. “I don’t see anything in the future anymore; I don’t see two-thirds of the available rides,” he said. Fourteen days later, he said, he was able to set up scheduled rides again.
But in the meantime, he found, it “just crushes your earnings,” he said. “If you want to just continue to do the scheduled rides, it makes it very challenging,” he added.
“Reserving scheduled rides is a great way for drivers to make the most of their time by picking a ride time and route that’s convenient for them in advance,” a Lyft spokesperson told BI. “To ensure a reliable experience for everyone, drivers should only reserve rides they can complete every time, and excessive cancellations may result in temporarily reduced access for 14 days.”
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