I just ordered a Lyft the other day and was talking to the driver on the way to the airport, he said a common route he drives is from Bozeman (MT) to Big Sky (for the ski tourists), the price is over 150$ on Lyft/Uber, and he ends up getting about 60-70$ from it max.

This type of cut, plus the massive false advertising that Uber/Lyft does via their apps in smaller towns, like telling you that your ride will be booked soon when there are literally no drivers available, have led to me just using prebooked car services when I can now. It costs a bit more, but they are 100% reliable in my experiences, more money is going directly to the drivers, and it supports the local economy.

> like telling you that your ride will be booked soon when there are literally no drivers available

I got burned on this using Lyft to get the airport early in the morning. Scheduled the night before to pick up at 5am the next morning. No one was actually scheduled, and it was just searching endlessly for a driver in the area but there were none! No car services open, I had to call my mother and ask her to take us! I couldn't believe it and I'll never use one again. Only car services for me now, at least for anything that matters.

Same. The language they use for that feature (on both apps) is extremely misleading, if not just straight up false. They clearly want you to believe that you are guaranteed a ride when you schedule ahead.

That’s not full story though - with incentives Uber cut is much smaller and in many cases drivers actually got more than the customer paid.

That's no longer the case. It was the situation at the beginning, but multiple cab folks have told me that incentives have really reduced in the last four years.

To be fair the last two years were not kind to ride sharing.

I wish people would stop calling it ride sharing, as it implies that one of your buddies is giving you a lift. It's just a marketing term.

Uber and Lyft are (gig economy) cab companies.

Well, shared rides were pretty popular pre-pandemic. Cabs never really did shared rides (at least not legitimately). I pretty much always opted for the shared option whenever I Uber’d or Lyfted.

So how did these work? How did the driver tell where they were coming from and where they were going? And was it worth their time? I can't think sharing your own ride is easy to solve. And no if you add more people when you are professionally driving it is still not ride sharing, it's just bus service at that time.

I think GP is talking about services like Lyft Line where the driver would pick up a second passenger on the way, the route calculated for efficiency.

Yes Lyft Line and Uber Pool. I know Uber pool achieved break even just before the pandemic. It was remarkably cheap and popular in high use areas like major cities. Even if it wasn’t a super profitable product it was a great service that reduced car dependency in America.

True, but the comments were from pre-pandemic times.

I refuse to use Uber but I’ll take Lyft since it is impossible to get an actual taxi anymore.

My last ride I was talking to the driver about someone canceling a $50 fare and her getting it instead which lead to the discovery of her getting $22 of the $48 (minus tip) I was charged.

It amazes me people are still driving for them.

I agree that Uber is using VC cash to outcompete more effective businesses. It's not sustainable, but in many cases those businesses were predatory either to their employees or the public. This isn't the case everywhere.

I talked with some ex-cabbie Uber drivers. With cabs, they had to pay back the owner each shift for use of the vehicle and license. About half of the shift would be worked free. If they were new and got weekday graveyard, it was particularly bad. They seemed much happier with Uber. I'm a bit concerned about hard to quantify costs like vehicle wear ultimately making it worse, though.