Before the sun could rise on Los Angeles International Airport on a recent Tuesday, hundreds of Uber and Lyft drivers had formed a queue nearby, which stretched around the block. It was 5 hours and the waiting game was about to start.
Within a few minutes, the line of cars would hire a fenced parking space, a mile of the arrival terminals. It is officially known as the stage of the transport network company, but drivers call it the ‘pen’, where they wait to be linked to passengers who come from flights.
The place used to be an excellent place to catch journeys and earning decent money. But nowadays there seem to be few journeys to go around. Veronica Hernandez, 50, parked her white Chevy Malibu at 5:26 am and opened the Lyft app to check her place in the queue: 156th. It would take an hour and a half for her first ride of the day.
“You have good days and bad days,” said Mrs. Hernandez, by wiping a screen that shows her daily income on the app that week: $ 205, $ 245, $ 179. “Hopefully it’s a good day.”
Just like Rij-Hail drivers throughout the country, Mrs. Hernandez has seen her in recent years, even if the demand for her work feels greater than ever. And with the costs of gas and car insurance rising, the already slender margins of performances are becoming less workable by the day, she said. No place is more symbolic for these problems than Lax, one of the busiest airports in the world, but one of the most difficult places for performances to earn a living.
“It used to be a real way to make money,” said Mrs. Hernandez. “Now you can hardly survive.”
In the early years of app-based platforms such as Uber, Lyft and Doordash, people flocked together to register as drivers. The idea of making money by simply driving someone in your own car, in your own schedule, appealed to many, from professional drivers who were looking for extra work to employees who worked in the service sector who realized that they could separate from the 9-to-5 times.
The key concept was that directors would be independent contractors, responsible for their own costs, without a health insurance or other employee benefits, but with the flexibility to work what they wanted, without signing up for a service or having a boss.
And in the early years, wages were high. Drivers regularly took thousands of dollars home a week, because Uber and Lyft pushed the growth over the win, which placed quarterly losses in the billions of dollars. When they became public companies, profitability became a focus and wages gradually.
Now the income in the back of inflation has fallen and have fallen for many drivers. Last year Uber drivers earned an average of $ 513 per week in gross income, a decrease of 3.4 percent compared to the previous year, even if they worked on average six minutes more per week, according to Gridwise, an app that collects data and drivers helps to follow their income. For drivers in Los Angeles, the average income per hour on Uber has fallen by 21 percent since 2021, Gridwise found.
Lax introduced the new system in 2019, in an attempt to reduce the bumper-to-bumper traffic at the arrival terminal. Instead of being picked up by Uber and LYFT steering programs at the curb, passengers must walk or take a shuttle from their terminal to a pick-up place called Lax-it, next to Terminal 1, which can take up to 20 minutes. But the driver’s side of the comparison is something that passengers rarely see.
That morning, within the plot, with hundreds of parked cars and the scent of Port-a pots, the mood was grim. Drivers have waited hours to tie rides – ‘unicorns’, they called them – who would pay them a decent wage of more than $ 1.50 per mile.
The pen was transferred to chaos around 10 am. While around 300 drivers are waiting in the virtual queue at a certain moment, the parking lot has only about 200 places. So, while new cars were submitted, third parties they were double parked for cars that were already there, who had to leave the lot to pick up passengers. The result: a cacophony of honking and screaming, only drowned out by the roar of the Jet aircraft above the head, which arrived approximately every two minutes.
Sergio Avedian, a gig driver and the founder of a Rij-Hailing-Blog called The Rideshare Mansettled in the pen on a recent Tuesday morning at 10:36. After he found a parking space, he opened the queue – 256th in line.
While he looked at the Uber and Lyft apps, rides appeared that were rejected by drivers higher in the queue. But the rates were pathetic: $ 9.87 for a journey of 13 miles, $ 19.97 for a 25 -mileage trip and so on. He rejected them all.
“We call this” decline and leaning back, “said Mr. Avedian, lowering his front seat.
To kill the time, groups of drivers smoke cigarettes and play cards. A nap in their cars or view YouTube videos. Others wander around Hawking phone chargers and auto-clearing products. Occasionally arguments break out between different groups – sometimes along racial lines – when the competition for scarce journeys becomes fierce.
There is a separate economy in the pen to feed drivers. Outside of the parking lot, Taco trucks are, but inside some women sell Chinese food from the trunks of their cars and plastic bowls of wonton soup for cash.
Some drivers have removed their frustrations by cursing Uber and his managers on the walls within the Haven-A pots, regretting the hours of journeys that do not result in tips, or the days that they are locked out of their accounts without an explanation.
Without in the trunk room of his Toyota Sienna, Andtheh Andria’s smoked a cigarette while he renewed his Uber app. Mr. Andrias, a 57-year-old from Iran, said he could earn $ 3,000 a week for the costs that run for the Uber pandemic, but that has since decreased considerably. He flipped through his most recent weekly income on his phone: $ 1,670, $ 1,700, $ 1,053.
“You have to take care of the family,” said Mr. Andrias, who has a woman and daughter, and more than $ 7,000 in car and rent payments to do. “At the moment I can’t do that.”
The New York Times first asked Uber about the circumstances to ride at Lax in 2023, and the company said it was aware of continuous problems. But since then not much has changed.
Uber said that various factors were responsible for lower wages, and that the percentage of the percentage of the rate of every ride it holds for itself – had not increased in Los Angeles. The liability insurance costs, the company said, were shot up and now account for 43 percent of the rider’s rate.
The company also said that a surcharge of $ 4 for Rij-Hail drivers at Lax, along with the new pick-up system, had considerably reduced the demand for journeys at the airport.
Lax’s Public Relations Division did not respond to a request for comments.
CJ Macklin, a spokesperson for Lyft, said that the company worked with Lax to develop a new Hold-Kavel for Rij-Hailing drivers, which would be built as part of the new construction project of $ 5.5 billion of the airport, with a light rail between terminals and is supposed to reduce traffic.
“In a year, Lax will look completely different, and we are enthusiastic about a smoother, faster experience for drivers, riders and the entire city,” said Meghan Cassly, a spokeswoman for Uber, in a statement.
On the site there was a penetrating sense of slowness; The dissatisfaction and hours of waiting seemed to scrap inactivity, even when an apparently decent ride chimed on their phones.
“There are drivers who really don’t know what they are doing, and they only end up on the lot because they don’t know better,” said Pablo Gomez, a Uber driver who visits Laks. “They dropped a passenger, it was said that they would go to the lot, and they are like,” Ok. ” They don’t even know what they are waiting for. “
Lawyers proponents such as Mr Avedian and Mr. Gomez try to help drivers strategize and get the most out of their time. But Mr. Gomez also empathized with drivers who continue to pray for a windfall. He used to be a compulsive gambler, he said, and driving for Uber feels similar.
“The wasted time is part of that psychology of the addict. You just haunt that ride, that score,” he said.
At 2 o’clock, when the pen closed, some drivers left to look for a parking space elsewhere, where they would sleep in their car until the party was reopened at 5 am. Others hoped to make a final ride in the direction of home, which was more than an hour away for many.
Mrs. Hernandez was on Tuesday on the hood of her car when it hit 11 p.m., her time to go home. She watched how offers on her phone appear against the wallpaper of her two children aged 25 and 26 years. Between the journeys she checked her e -mail, hoping to hear from jobs she recently requested in a doctor’s office and a warehouse.
Finally, a ride appeared that would take her near her house in Montebello, a 50 -minute ride to the east. It was only $ 28 for a journey of 27 miles from a unicorn but she accepted it.
“It’s not the best rate,” she said. “But you have to make it worth your time.”
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