TL;DR - Uber and Lyft are both guilty of overcharging passengers and underpaying drivers. Please stop using these services.
Uber and Lyft have become very popular services especially among those who are out for a night of drinking. These services have also become popular amongst people looking for supplemental income or those between jobs. Both services offer sign-on bonuses in certain cities as well as incentivized bonuses for completing certain numbers of rides under specific circumstances. But before we start discussing bonuses, it is probably better to start with an explanation of how each platform pays their drivers:
When I signed up for Uber in fall of 2017, both apps were taking a fee of about $2.00 off the initial fare. Then they were to take 20% of whatever is left. The driver takes home the rest plus 100% of the tip. It was a fair payment system. If the rider got charged a surge fee, we would collect 80% of that as a surge bonus. The apps got their 20%, which is arguably a lot of money considering Entertainment managers and agents are known to take about 10-15%.
Back in 2017, the bonuses offered to drivers were also fairly plentiful. There were a number of ways to earn extra bonuses. The most well-known bonus on the Lyft app was the power driver bonus. This bonus was offered to drivers that kept a 90% acceptance rate as well as completing some number of rides throughout the week. There were 3 tiers for this bonus. The first tier would be about 20 rides, earning drivers an extra $35. The second tier was approximately 40 rides, earning drivers somewhere around $100 extra. The final tier was approximately 80 rides and this would earn the driver an extra $260. I don't think anyone would argue that this was unfair for the drivers. It was actually one of the reasons I started driving for Lyft. This bonus made driving for Lyft more lucrative than driving for Uber and made the entire ordeal worth my time.
Sometime in 2018, the app started to increase the number of rides required to earn a power driver bonus and decreased the reward. It was no longer worth it to try to give over 100 rides per week just to earn an extra $150. That is what was being offered but they justified this action by introducing something called a streak bonus. The streak bonus would only be given to drivers that gave 3-5 rides in a row, earning them an extra $2-3 per ride. This was basically an incentive to stay on one app and to not drive for another. Both apps started giving out this bonus, however Uber changed it to a specific number of rides in a given time range rather than forcing you to give these rides consecutively.
About halfway through 2018, Lyft got rid of the power driver bonus altogether and also got rid of primetime bonuses. A lot of drivers protested in forums. Uber kept their surge bonuses but Lyft introduced a "test" to about half of the drivers in a few specific cities. I happened to be one of the test subjects, against my will. The test was to introduce "heat maps" and "bonus zones" instead of primetime pricing. The apps were still charging riders primetime pricing but now they would pay their drivers a capped dollar value on top of each ride. Here is some math to explain how that works. A bonus zone would have a dollar value of maybe $5. If you drive into this zone, you will get $5 on your next ride. As you wait for a ride, this value will increase until it hits $10. If you are to get a ride, $10 will now be added onto your ride. Let's say you pick someone up and they want you to drive them 25 miles. This person could be paying 4x the normal cost depending on where they got picked up or after what event. They would be paying for a 100 mile ride. Normally, the driver would then be paid for 80% of this which comes out to 80 miles. Not anymore. With this new bonus, the driver would still only be paid for a 25 mile ride, 80% of it actually, so the driver gets paid for 20 miles plus $10. You could have paid over $100 for the ride, the driver would get paid around $30. Lyft would then pocket $70 or 70% of the ride fare. Obviously, this was very maddening for a lot of the drivers. Especially drivers that had been putting in hard working hours for these companies over multi-year periods. Imagine working for a company for many years and instead of getting a raise, they decide to cut your pay by 50%. That is essentially how Lyft treats their drivers.
Uber never took part in any of these tactics until December 24th, 2018. The day before Christmas, Uber decided to give their drivers a new bonus offering as a Christmas gift. It was exactly the same as Heat maps on Lyft. Pretty much the Grinch-iest thing any corporation could possibly do. So while customers were being charged 5x on New Years for rides out of downtown areas, the platforms were throwing their drivers an extra $5-15 and pocketing the rest. They stood to make millions of extra dollars this way. And they did. Drivers were paid on average 50% less than they were paid last year. I personally drove for 10 hours on New Years from 6pm until 4am and I made less money than I made driving for 2 hours last year.
Lyft partook in some even worse practices on New Years by trying to undercut the competition. They engaged in a practice called "price gauging" by offering riders extremely low prices to their riders on New Years. The way they were able to do this is by not offering drivers any primetime or heat map bonuses at all. A lot of passengers noticed that Lyft drivers were cancelling rides or not accepting them at all because Uber was paying out better bonuses - which were still far less than riders were paying. One of my passengers thanked me because she'd been cancelled on 6 times. While Uber was charging 5x for rides from the downtown area of Nashville, Lyft started charging riders regular fare. While drivers gave up their holiday and didn't drink to get Lyft passengers home safe, they were repaid by having to sit in some of the worst traffic of the year for regular rate pay on the Lyft app or for a few extra dollars on the Uber app.
This is the last straw for me and probably for a lot of drivers. I will no longer be driving for these apps after a year of 50+ hr weeks of dedicated driving. I have given over 2000 rides and have an average rating of 4.95/5. The apps do not care about their customers, they don't care about their drivers, they only care about pocketing as much money as possible. And they did this very unethically by ringing in as many people as they can, getting people used to using these apps, and then changing the pricing and the way they pay out once people are already comfortable using them.
This is how drug dealers operate. You are hooked on something, the price goes up over time and you feel you need it. You don't. You got around before Uber and Lyft existed and you should get around without them this year. You shouldn't use services that don't pay their employees well. And if you absolutely insist on using them, you should be tipping your driver. People will jump in front of cars and off bridges to make sure that people tip their waiter/waitress 20% for serving you other people's food. Uber and Lyft drivers are expected to usher you around in their own vehicle, risking their property and their life - if that doesn't deserve as much tip as a waiter/waitress in your mind, you need to rethink things. One of my passengers on New Years got in my car, bragged about having just tipped her waitress $100 for an $80 meal and then literally did not even give me a tip for getting her home safely.
Please boycott Uber and Lyft - stop allowing them to overcharge passengers and underpay drivers.