An overly long story on the origins of JUMP, its acquisition by Uber and how Uber ran it into the ground. While I have been a big fan of the bike-sharing concept, I have always been skeptical of the economic model. The article also gives a good glimpse into the Uber mentality of doing business. Not a pretty picture.
How Uber Turned a Promising Bikeshare Company Into Literal Garbage
JUMP wanted to create a better, more bike-friendly world. Former employees told Motherboard how getting acquired by Uber led to JUMP bikes being destroyed by the thousands.
by Aaron Gordon
Vice - Motherboard
Jun 23 2020, 8:00am
One morning at the end of May, Mark Miretsky awoke in his San Francisco apartment and groggily browsed his phone. There was no rush to get up. Just a few weeks earlier, he had been laid off from his job at the bikeshare company JUMP, which was owned by Uber, along with hundreds of other people.
While still lazing in bed, he opened the Slack with more than 400 of JUMP’s laid-off staff, and he saw something that hurt him even more than the layoffs. The JUMP bikes were being destroyed by the thousands and someone was posting videos of it on Twitter.
At first, Miretsky couldn’t bring himself to watch. He spent eight years of his life, often working 100-hour weeks to the point of nauseous exhaustion, to get people to ride those bikes. He did this because he believed in bicycles, and that they are worth riding.
Miretsky's family left the Soviet Union when his mother was pregnant with him. They briefly lived in Italy but couldn’t afford any mode of transportation other than a single bike. His dad pedaled, his mom rode side saddle on the rear rack, and his brother, just a toddler at the time, sat in the basket. Miretsky grew up hearing these stories, and even if he didn’t realize it at the time, he said it taught him bicycles are the cheapest, most efficient, and equitable way to get around. He would end up spending most of his adult life working with bicycles, caring about them so much he can’t even bring himself to get rid of any of his seven bikes.
In one of the videos, viewers can hear the claw crunching the frames and baskets while lifting the JUMP bikes. That was enough. Miretsky didn’t need to watch a second time.
“It kind of crushes one’s heart,” Miretsky said. He had difficulty putting into words exactly how he felt, but he repeated what one of his former coworkers told him. To the die-hard bike enthusiasts who worked at JUMP, destroying bikes is like burning books. “To me, and to many of us [who worked at JUMP] the bike is not an object to a means of a business. It has a soul.”
Few, if any, of JUMP’s former employees were shocked by the videos. To some, it even felt like a fitting, if upsetting, coda to a troubled two years under Uber’s stewardship.
Motherboard spoke to a dozen former JUMP employees about their time at the company, most under the condition of anonymity because they signed non-disclosure agreements in order to receive severance and extended health care during a global pandemic. Former JUMP employees who agreed to speak on the record did so under the condition they not talk about the time the company was owned by Uber. They described remarkably similar experiences, in which JUMP, a previously thrifty company, with a culture that had a deep commitment to a shared sense of purpose gave way to Uber’s scale-obsessed model. The early promises of bikeshare for the world and replacing ridehail trips with bike journeys only partially materialized, but it came with unsustainable inefficiencies and waste. Uber bought JUMP in 2018 and two years later sold it to Lime, a changed and broken company. To these employees, the literal destruction of the bikes was a metaphor for the destruction of the operation they’d worked so hard to build.
Uber’s unrelenting pursuit of scale created all sorts of problems for those working on the bikeshare systems on the ground. In cities with high rates of theft or vandalism, the same people hired to retrieve, charge, and fix bikes were also responsible for recovering stolen ones, an occasionally dicey proposition. To address this, Uber hired private security teams, which three employees referred to as “hired goons,” to assist in getting the stolen bikes back. One employee from Providence, Rhode Island, described a scene in which one “hired goon” wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying handcuffs and pepper spray “tackled” a Black teenage girl riding a JUMP bike. The employee said it was something he would “never forget” and that “the optics didn’t look good, as people would say.” An Uber spokesperson said the company has no records of such an incident taking place and this account is “wholly inaccurate” because JUMP technicians and the security teams accompanying them were instructed not to forcibly remove anyone from the bikes or “engage in aggressive behavior.”
While hardly typical of JUMP’s operations, the incident—which occurred last year during a rash of thefts enabled by a faulty bike lock design—exemplifies just how far the company strayed from its original mission of getting people of all walks of life onto bikes. JUMP used to be a company that held countless community meetings in low-income neighborhoods prior to launching in a new city to make sure they were addressing everyone’s needs and offered low-income residents virtually unlimited biking for just a few dollars a month.
But JUMP’s rise and fall is not just about Uber—which only owned the company for two out of its 10 years of existence—or even just about bikeshare. It's about the role cities play in determining their futures, how much of that role has been usurped by a handful of people with a lot of money, and the perils of trying to be the good guy.
Even with everything that’s happened, many former JUMP employees still think selling the company to Uber was the right decision. Had it not, one former employee told Motherboard, “the company might have saved its soul but died much younger.”
Ryan Rzepecki became a cycling evangelist when he borrowed his roommate’s bike one summer day in 2005 when he was living in New York City's East Village. It made getting around the city so much easier and more pleasant, even though at the time New York didn’t have anything resembling safe bike infrastructure.
On a trip to Paris, Rzepecki came across the Velib bikeshare system. Although Velib has had its problems, to Rzepecki’s eyes it was a marvel: tens of thousands of bikes for Parisians to use for a very small fee. No worrying about locking the bike, storing it, maintenance, or repairs. Just unlock it, ride it, dock it, and be on your way.
But Rzepecki had an idea for a different kind of bikeshare system. He wanted one without docks, where people could begin and end their rides anywhere they like. He thought this would be the key to unlocking cycling for the masses. In 2010, he started Social Bicycles.
The original business model of Social Bicycles (SoBi) was different from the one it would adopt after rebranding as JUMP eight years later. Instead of going directly to people, it sold its proprietary bikes and docking stations to cities, which would then contract with another third party to operate the bikeshare system.
The key to this model was SoBi’s quasi-docked model, in which every bike had a GPS unit and a built-in lock. Riders had to lock the bike to something, and were encouraged to lock the bikes to SoBi’s docking stations but could use regular bike racks if they wanted.
“It’s probably good I didn’t have a technical background,” Rzepecki told Motherboard, “because if I knew how hard it would be, I probably never would have attempted it.” It was not a simple or easy business. Back then, cities would put out Requests for Proposals (RFPs) that announced they were interested in a bikeshare system, triggering a two-year process that, if all went well, resulted in a bikeshare system. The RFP process ensured a deep partnership with the city that would minimize long-term uncertainty or community outrage over bike rack locations. For both SoBi and the cities in which they worked, this trade-off was worth it, because they were in it for the long haul.
SoBi hired urban planners to help cities with the expense of figuring out where new bike racks should go. This involved not only painstakingly drawing architectural renderings for hundreds of bike racks but also presenting those drawings to local community groups to hear their feedback. As a general rule, they drew up plans for about three times as many racks as they would ultimately install, knowing local community groups tended to reject about two-thirds of them.
While this approach to a bikeshare system was complicated, time-consuming, and expensive, Rzepecki and his early team thought it was the best way to forge the kind of relationships between the city government, local bike advocates, and casual riders to allow bikesharing to thrive in the long run.
Likewise, Rzepecki wanted SoBi’s bikes to be comfortable and fun to ride. They debated the merits of certain bolts over others, the size of the baskets, and the best distance between the handlebars for the most comfortable ride for the most people. SoBi’s designer, Nick Foley, and the other designers not only took into account the rider experience, but also that of the mechanics charged with fixing and maintaining the bikes. They standardized parts, reduced the number of different bolts and screws as much as possible, and put thought into how to make flat tires easy to replace. The bikes were not to be disposable objects, but permanent, rideable street art.
“Ryan’s goal was the bicycle comes first,” another former employee told Motherboard. “He brings that kind of attitude, that I want to make my city better.”
All that attention to detail notwithstanding, in the early days SoBi’s technology barely worked. One of its first clients in 2012, the San Francisco International Airport, wanted a bikeshare program for employees to use during their lunch breaks. But the bikes barely worked. Miretsky remembers having to run around the airport to reboot the bikes’ onboard computers, which he described as “super 1.0 early beta technology that wasn’t working” in which the GPS and computer unit was attached to the bike with Velcro.
There wasn’t very much money in the bikeshare world then. The company was operating hand-to-mouth, people were forgoing paychecks some weeks, and everyone was working on shoestring budgets. One employee recalled the “SoBi flop houses” where six of them would live in a two-bedroom Airbnb to save on costs. The unlucky ones who didn’t get a bedroom would sleep on the floor; more than one former SoBi employee recommended if I ever find myself in a similar situation, I snag the space under the dining room table so that anyone getting up in the middle of the night doesn’t step on me.
With this shared sacrifice came shared responsibility. The company structure was remarkably flat. Once a month, everyone would get on a call and make decisions together by consensus. People’s titles only vaguely aligned with their actual jobs. “Things got done because everyone wanted them to get done, not because someone was assigning them or there were super-clear expectations,” one employee described it. “You just went to wherever you could supply the most-needed help.”
Over time, SoBi worked out the kinks, and each contract got slightly bigger than the last. Its big breakout came in 2016, when 1,000 of its bikes launched in Portland’s Biketown program, sponsored by Nike. It was the company's biggest launch to date and also its most successful. It was also the first year SoBi was profitable. Things were looking up, until the people at SoBi started hearing about these bikeshare companies out of China.
“Here’s where the story changes,” Rzepecki said. “Just as we were figuring out how to do bikeshare and make it work, the entire landscape changed.”
Up to that point, the bikeshare world was a small one, an industry of government contractors and their suppliers. Companies couldn’t be neatly divided between partners and competitors. Social Bicycles sold its hardware to Motivate, which operates the biggest docked bikeshare systems around the country, to operate Biketown, even though SoBi and Motivate would compete for contracts elsewhere (to complicate the dynamic, Motivate was purchased by Lyft around the same time JUMP was bought by Uber). It was a small world, in part because it had to be; there wasn’t enough money in bikeshare to make it any bigger.
Which is why when two Beijing-based bikeshare firms, Ofo and Mobike, expanded to the United States right around the same time Biketown launched, it blew up everything the bikeshare world had known.
Rather than work closely with cities over years, Ofo and Mobike parachuted in, got permission to launch a bike share by shoveling money at cities, and then did it. They also introduced a fully dockless model known as “free lock,” in which riders didn’t have to lock their bikes to anything after finishing a ride. They could leave them wherever they wanted, including in the middle of sidewalks and strewn across lawns.
“At least initially, there was this hint of hope that this big dumb app company was actually helping push us towards a more sustainable transportation ecosystem.”
This went against everything SoBi believed in. It not only was a short-sighted strategy that was sure to create conflict with city officials and communities—the very people SoBi felt were integral to any bikeshare systems’s success—but it sent the wrong message about the bikes themselves.
“Freelocking turns the vehicles into trash and blocks the sidewalk,” one former JUMP employee said, “which is both bad for business and bad for cities.” It turns bikes into obstacles for people with mobility issues, the exact opposite of what bikes are supposed to be. And it sends the message that the bikes are disposable, have little value, and belong to no one.
But it was not the free lock element of the Ofo and MoBike model that changed everything, at least not directly. Without the need to go through the lengthy RFP process or site docks, Ofo, Mobike, and their countless imitators could grow as quickly as their bank accounts permitted. It was catnip for the type of venture capital investors who love exponential growth charts.
Suddenly, dockless bikeshare became the trendy investment. From October 2016 through July 2017, Ofo raised $1.28 billion in two funding rounds, according to Crunchbase. Mobike raised more than $800 million. In October 2017, the newly-founded Lime (then called LimeBike) raised $50 million. To Social Bicycles, this was an unimaginable amount of money. Up to 2016, SoBi had raised only a few million dollars.
“It became a feeling of there is no way we can succeed anymore,” Miretsky said. “We were playing checkers and it suddenly became chess.”
“They would go into markets we were just in with RFPs and said ‘we’ll pay you. How many bikes do you need? We’ll give you more,’” Miretsky recalled. “Cities said well great, this is no longer a problem for us to solve, the business community has solved it.”
Almost overnight, Rzepecki said SoBi lost 25 percent of its revenue. For sexy startups like Mobike and Ofo, a 25 percent revenue drop would be a tough pill to swallow. For SoBi, it was poison. Thanks to overseas investors flooding the market with cheap bikes, the time of working closely with cities to build a sustainable bikeshare system was over. The RFP approach, everything SoBi had built its business around, was dead.
SoBi pivoted to be a permit-based dockless bikeshare company like the others. But it resisted what it viewed as an ideological non-starter and it did not succumb to the free lock model. Just as in the SoBi days, riders would still have to end the ride by locking the bike to something.
Moreover, SoBi didn’t need to compromise on its deeper philosophy because Rzepecki had an ace up his sleeve. For two years, SoBi had been secretly developing an electric bike, where a battery-powered motor helps the rider pedal, making bike riding an effortless endeavor even up the steepest of hills and longest of distances. Former employees credited Rzepecki and Foley for having the foresight to know the entire industry would eventually shift to e-bikes, and the only way JUMP could survive was to get there first. And it
In the summer of 2017, as JUMP was looking for investors to stay afloat, Uber invited two JUMP employees in to demonstrate the e-bike, sparking conflicted feelings among the JUMP staff. This was right at the height of an Uber public relations disaster, as its co-founder Travis Kalanick floundered in the days leading up to his resignation. At this stage, Uber was virtually synonymous with spoiled rich kids flouting laws and operating solely according to their own internal code. Among the JUMP staff, Uber was regarded as wasteful and environmentally irresponsible at best and downright evil at worst.
Some former employees believe JUMP ultimately took the meeting as an intelligence-gathering operation, others as an implicit admission of JUMP’s precarious condition despite the distasteful prospect of working with the company so many of them loathed.
In any case, two JUMP employees rode the e-bikes to Uber’s headquarters on Market Street, where Dmitry Shevelenko and Jahan Khanna, the duo behind Uber’s micromobility and transit expansion, took them for a test ride.
“This was like the first time using an iPhone.” Shevelenko told Motherboard. “It just feels magical.” He had demo’d other bikeshare e-bikes in recent months, but the JUMP bike was far superior. Instead of having a motor that kicked into gear providing an unwanted jolt, JUMP’s e-bikes sensed how hard a rider pedaled and increased the motor power to match what the rider is doing. It felt like a partnership between human and bike, not a human ceding total control to a machine. “It was almost like a superpower,” Shevelenko recalled, “like this bike is connected to your body.”
Shevelenko and Khanna viewed the e-bike as a perfect complement to Uber’s ridehailing business. Insofar as it would cannibalize Uber trips, it would be shorter city trips that weren’t profitable anyways. The e-bike would not only be cheaper for riders, but also quicker during rush hours in the dense urban areas where Uber is most popular. And Uber wanted JUMP’s superior product. Shevelenko figured JUMP had a year’s head start on every other dockless e-bike. Paired with Uber’s resources, they thought it would be hard for anyone else to catch up.
Image: CHESNOT/GETTY IMAGES
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After some brief negotiating, the companies initially formed a partnership and Uber connected JUMP with the venture capital firm Menlo Ventures to keep the company afloat. Starting in January 2018, SoBi officially rebranded as JUMP and its bikes would be shown as a rental option in the Uber app. Four months later, Uber acquired JUMP for close to $200 million.
It was, undoubtedly, an odd pair, not just in mission but in corporate culture. Many of JUMP’s staff were self-described hippies, a far cry from Uber’s bro culture and no-holds-barred approach to business. But, the acquisition made sense as one between two companies struggling to figure out what they were doing at a time when the old way was no longer going to cut it. Uber had to clean up its act and put on a good face for investors in a run up to a public offering, while JUMP had to find a model that worked in the dockless world of VC capital.
On a personal level, eight years of bikeshare startup life had taken its toll on Rzepecki and the original SoBi crew. To illustrate the point, Miretsky said that when he visited the New York office where Rzepecki was based, he had stopped buying breakfast, because he knew Rzepecki would take two bites of a breakfast sandwich, vomit it up from nerves, and then give Miretsky the rest of the sandwich.
When asked about this, Rzepecki confirmed his stress manifested with various physical symptoms around that time, and that “2017 was particularly hard.”
“I think it’s really on the right course now and [Uber’s then-new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi] believes the way we approach working with cities and our vision for partnering with cities” aligns with Uber’s mission, Rzepecki told TechCrunch when the acquisition was announced. “That was important for me and his desire to do things the right way. This is a great outcome and gives me a chance to bring my entire vision to the entire world.”
“At least initially, there was this hint of hope that this big dumb app company was actually helping push us towards a more sustainable transportation ecosystem,” a former JUMP employee said. “And then they fucked it up.”
Accounts differ on precisely how long it took Uber to undermine everything JUMP had previously been about. Some former employees said it happened virtually immediately. Others described a more gradual process that took a few weeks. But they unanimously agreed it didn’t take long at all for JUMP to stop being JUMP.
Not only were JUMP employees no longer working on a shoestring budget, they barely had any budgets at all. Sleeping under the dining room table gave way to $400 per night hotel rooms. Like the Ofos and MoBikes they long decried, JUMP was now buying as many bikes it could get its hands on.
For a split second, JUMP was “the hot new thing” at Uber, as one former employee put it. Khosrowshahi talked it up during company all-hands meetings and in the press. He came to the warehouse where JUMP built new prototypes.
"During rush hour, it is very inefficient for a one-ton hulk of metal to take one person 10 blocks," Khosrowshahi said at the time. With JUMP, "we're able to shape behavior in a way that's a win for the user. It's a win for the city. Short-term financially, maybe it's not a win for us, but strategically, long term we think that is exactly where we want to head."
One of the first signs that the acquisition was not going as planned came just two months after the acquisition when Uber put longtime employee Rachel Holt in charge of the New Mobility unit. In one of her first meetings with the JUMP team, Holt made it very clear that she was in charge, as multiple employees recalled. This directly undermined what Rzepecki had publicly said when the acquisition was announced, that JUMP would remain independent of Uber. Now, the employees were being told that wasn’t the case. When asked about this reversal, an Uber spokesperson described Holt as “a longtime Uber executive with experience growing a mobility business.” Holt did not respond to a list of questions sent by Motherboard.
"There was also an awareness that this was no longer some private company, that it was fucking Uber now."
Holt brought an Uber 1.0 approach to bikeshare, one that mimicked what companies like MoBike and Ofo were doing (MoBike co-founder Wang Xiaofeng had previously been general manager of Uber’s Shanghai operations). They flooded the streets with bikes under the philosophy that any second a bike is not on the street, it's losing money. They expanded to new markets and hired so many people so fast some employees spent half their time in hiring meetings and prospective employee interviews. Teams doubled or tripled in size within months, only to find they were now overstaffed. Bike mechanics at the main warehouse would have thousands of bikes to build that were just delivered from China, but local mechanics in the cities where JUMP operated didn’t have spare parts to fix the bikes on the street.
In other words, JUMP employees felt Uber was applying a software business mentality to bikeshare. It was, to JUMP’s longtime employees, a fundamental misunderstanding of what kind of business they were in. Uber was running JUMP with the mindset that anything that’s broken can be patched, but, as one employee put it, “a firmware update can’t fix a bike chain.”
“Like any startup (whether inside of Uber or out), JUMP’s early days can be characterized as scrappy,” an Uber spokesperson said. “JUMP was scaling very quickly. When we bought JUMP they were a very small company with a fleet of only 500 e-bikes in San Francisco. When we merged with Lime a few weeks ago, we had tens of thousands of e-bikes and scooters in 30 cities around the world.”
Otherwise an impressive feat of engineering, the bikes JUMP released in early 2019 under Uber had one critical flaw. JUMP replaced the sturdy if bulky U-lock with a cable lock in order to make the bikes easier to secure. But the cable lock wasn’t robust. It was a critical oversight, one that highlighted how far JUMP had strayed from its roots, since any New York City bicyclist knows a cable lock is an open invitation for theft. All someone had to do was flip the 75-pound bike over and the cable would snap under its own momentum (there was also a method using a hammer that took more finesse). With a few well-placed blows, thieves could easily disable the GPS unit and be on their way with a (very heavy) bike.
While every city experienced some degree of theft, Providence, Rhode Island experienced among the most because, for whatever reason, stealing JUMP bikes became a form of sport for the city’s teens.
“We didn’t understand the magnitude of the problem until it was too late,” one former JUMP employee familiar with the situation told Motherboard. “Hundreds and hundreds of bikes were getting stolen.”
In emails obtained by the Providence Journal, JUMP’s operations manager in Providence, Alex Kreuger, told the city that, in one weekend in July 2019, 150-200 bikes were vandalized out of a fleet of about 1,000 bikes.
“Someone brandished a gun on a field tech, kids tried to steal bikes directly from our warehouse, riders reported attempts by people to steal the bike as they were riding them,” Kreuger wrote.
In another instance, according to a source, an employee trying to retrieve a bike reportedly had to wield a broken kickstand to fend off some kids swinging a 2x4 at him.
In the fall, Uber hired a private security firm to ride along with the field technicians in order to retrieve the stolen bikes. This didn’t strike any of the employees as especially odd, since none of them had signed up to be fighting kids in the streets. One field tech who spoke to Motherboard estimated that "five to 10" instances resulted in private security workers physically restraining people while the bikes were being recovered, as was the case with the bulletproof vest-clad rent-a-cop tackling a kid riding a bike.
Among other things, the vandalism made it impossible for JUMP to have 90 percent of its bikes on the street at all times, as its contract with the city required. Sometimes, one former employee said, they’d have fewer than 300 bikes, or less than 30 percent of the fleet, on the street.
In August, JUMP pulled its bikes off the streets of Providence for what it claimed was a temporary period, but the bikes never returned. In October, the field technicians, who had ridden around with the security guys for weeks, received an email at the end of their shift telling them not to bother coming in anymore; they were all fired. The security guys got an email at the end of the shift, too; their new job was to take over bike retrieval, but their first order of business was to escort the field technicians out of the building.
At least one former Providence employee thinks the vandalism could not be disconnected from the Uber acquisition.
“There was also an awareness that this was no longer some private company, that it was fucking Uber now,” they told Motherboard. “This is owned by a corporation that doesn’t care about bettering anyone’s fucking community or whatever, so people saw an opportunity there.”
Whether or not that was the case, JUMP had bigger problems than just Providence, and Uber had bigger problems than just JUMP. After breakneck growth and an IPO in the spring of 2019, Uber was under more pressure than ever to show it could be profitable. And thanks to its growth-at-all costs approach to bikeshare, JUMP was leaking cash.
But it wasn’t the financial losses that bothered JUMP employees the most. It was the gradual erosion of everything that got them to sacrifice so much for the company in the first place. Morale tanked as people slowly noticed they were busting their asses to hit growth metrics. The joy of cycling and creating a community good was not only secondary to that, it was becoming a memory.
“We went from putting 45-pound steel plates with 35-pound racks down on street corners where we had paid surveyors to stand and count people riding and locking bikes and working very closely with municipal transportation services, universities, and community groups, to, from what I understand, basically offering cities as much money as they needed to launch as quickly as possible and putting as many bikes on the curb as quickly as possible wherever we could,” one former employee said. “That’s the same approach that Bird used for scooters, that Lime used for their bikes, and Ofo used for their bikes in Texas and got in so much trouble for. And that’s why they’re trash. And that’s why JUMP became trash.”
In September 2019, JUMP employees were transferred to a new entity called Sobi LLC, which some employees took as an indication they were being broken off for a sale. An Uber spokesperson said it was because “As JUMP grew its footprint, so did the need for more focused business support for day-to-day operations.”
Four months later, at the beginning of 2020, Rzepecki and a handful of other original Social Bicycle employees left. The following months would result in a cascading series of layoffs in which Uber let 25 percent of its staff go.
At the beginning of last month, The Information reported that Uber was leading a $170 million funding round in Lime in a deal that would involve transferring JUMP to them. This was news to the JUMP staff. In an all-hands call that day, Khosrowshahi refused to directly answer a question about JUMP’s future, which both irked and worried its employees. An Uber spokesperson said, as a public company, Khosrowshahi could not discuss the transaction before it finalized. The next day, Uber laid off nearly everyone at JUMP. Because it was in the middle of the pandemic, the laid off had one hour to say goodbye to their friends over Slack. Then their computers turned off.
Whatever comes of JUMP under Lime’s stewardship, it will be without the people who made JUMP what it was. Lime was founded in 2017 by two former venture capital executives who quickly bailed on bikes to hop onto the scooter fad. It even experimented with a carsharing service. Lime obtained the intellectual property rights for the newest versions of the JUMP bikes and scooters, but, as of now, none of the people who designed or built them.
The big question facing the bikeshare industry—and its scooter-share offshoots—is whether the business can ever be profitable. To date, the answer is no. Lime lost some $300 million last year while its major competitor, Bird—founded by a former Lyft and Uber executive— isn't faring much better. While 2020 doesn’t look poised to turn industry fortunes around due to the global pandemic, it is a testament to how poorly managed the micromobility industry has been that ceasing operations may, in fact, be a blessing in disguise for companies that haven’t figured out how to run a service without bleeding cash.
Unlike software, transportation is a deliberate business, sometimes painfully so. To tech executives, this appears to be a flaw, an inefficiency to disrupt. No doubt the RFP process and other regulations around the transportation industry can be improved, but there’s a reason transportation businesses move slowly. It costs too much to screw up, both in money and in reputation. Useful mass transportation doesn’t suddenly appear. It is carefully nurtured from a tiny seedling of a good idea to a fully-formed organism that breathes life into a city. It is a process that takes time and effort and patience as well as money.
For all their shortcomings, this is something the SoBi people knew well. It is also something Uber could never understand, because it has always rejected the premise that it’s in the transportation business. It’s been telling itself and regulators since its inception it is merely a business-to-business software application so it can skirt employment regulations that would force it to make all of its drivers employees. But that deception became so ingrained in company culture that it conducted itself as a software company even when it was purchasing and fixing bicycles by the tens of thousands. On the most basic level, it’s impossible to succeed when you don’t know what line of work you’re in.
On top of that, transportation companies have to work with the cities in which they operate whether they like it or not. To several of the employees Motherboard spoke to, this was the single biggest and most consequential culture shift after the acquisition. Whenever there was a problem with a city, Uber postured for a fight, which went against every instinct JUMP had.
“We wanted to work with [the cities] and build trust,” one former employee summarized. “Uber wanted to steamroll them.”
(“We disagree,” an Uber spokesman said. “JUMP worked diligently to address sidewalk riding and parking clutter through both operational changes and investing in innovative technology.”)
And the whole scheme was built on a faulty premise, that putting more and more bikes on the road in more and more cities would eventually result in profits, even though the company lost money on each ride. They imitated the strategy that MoBike and Ofo used to blow up the bikeshare industry—which itself imitated the strategy Uber used to become a global behemoth—because that’s what investors wanted to see.
But by the end of 2018, the very strategy JUMP would later imitate was clearly not working. MoBike was sold to Chinese neighborhood services company Meituan-Dianping and retreated from foreign markets (its European operations were spun off, so some MoBikes are still on the road there). In June of last year, a Chinese court found Ofo “has basically no assets,” according to Quartz, and couldn’t pay off its debts. Photos of mass bike graves of the erstwhile bikeshare boom went viral.
But the damage was done, because the perception of what bikeshare should be had been irrevocably altered. It was no longer a transportation business; it was a tech business, and everything that brought along with it.
Even at the time Ofo and MoBike were getting handed billions in cash, the JUMP people didn’t know what to think, because they were still thinking like bike people. “We didn't believe the unit economics worked,” Miretsky recalled, “Then we heard the companies said the unit economics worked, and we thought well they couldn't be lying, we wouldn't lie. And then it turned out later they were probably lying.”
After the videos of the bikes getting destroyed surfaced, several former JUMP employees wondered if there was something they could do to save as many bikes as they could. They asked that I not disclose who they were so as not to jeopardize the NDA they signed with Uber.
With some help from current Uber employees, they were able to save some. They will get donated to various groups and organizations. The Bike Share Museum in Florida got five, but an Uber spokesperson did not say who got the rest. But multiple sources told Motherboard that, in total, they saved 5,298 bikes. They each knew the exact number.
Over the last few weeks, thousands of perfectly good JUMP electric bikes and scooters have been dropped off at a recycling facility and will be shredded, Motherboard has learned. The untimely end of these micromobility devices comes at a particularly absurd time, with the nation facing a widespread bike shortage because of surging demand for safe, affordable urban transportation during the pandemic.
JUMP, a bike-and-scooter share startup sold to Uber in 2018, operates in 37 cities around the world, including 18 in the U.S., according to the company’s website. Under pressure to pursue profitability, Uber dumped JUMP onto Lime, another micromobility company with operations in 114 cities around the world, in a complicated deal earlier this month that resulted in Uber taking a larger share in Lime. The fate of JUMP and its distinctive red bikes and scooters was unclear until the videos of the crushers began to surface.
The photos and videos of the JUMP bike heaps posted to social media sites have disappointed former JUMP employees, bike and scooter advocates, and people who don't like to see useless waste. The micromobility industry is now practicing the exact kind of wastefulness shared sustainable transportation is supposed to counteract.
“Even if there isn’t a city government with the chops to convert unwanted Jumps into a new/used e-bike share system, why not at least peel the decals off and sell the bikes to individuals?” asked Jon Orcutt of the non-profit group Bike New York. He added that JUMP bikes have a reputation for being “really well-made and purpose-built for city transportation,” unlike the cheap dockless bikes from companies like MoBike and Ofo that ended up in mass graveyards. Likewise, Skip Scooters co-founder and CEO Sanjay Dastoor said the videos were tough to watch and called the JUMP bikes “the best shared e-bikes ever designed.”
David Zipper, a Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Taubman Center for State and Local Government who studies the micromobility industry said that given the shortage, the videos are “so jarring, and so troubling.”
A former JUMP employee, who asked to remain anonymous because they signed a non-disclosure agreement, said watching the videos stung them personally.
“Part of my personal pride in working for JUMP was witnessing first hand the impacts these bikes had on communities," they said. "And with COVID-19, the fleet of bikes that is being destroyed could've done even more good for cities. We're in the midst of a bike boom where more people are biking than ever. We're in the midst of an e-bike shortage induced by the Chinese trade war and tens of thousands of e-bikes are getting sold for scrap.”
A man who answered the phone at the Durham, North Carolina location of Foss Recycling confirmed they’ve received “about 18 trailers” filled with scooters and bikes over the last week—another source at the same location put the number of trailers closer to 30—and that after their batteries and electronics are removed they’re “going to be recycled.” He declined to give his name to Motherboard and, when asked why, replied “I don’t know where it’s going.”
Why exactly these functional bikes and scooters are being destroyed even when demand for them is at a peak requires diving into the confusing world of four-letter micromobility companies. JUMP was acquired by Uber in 2018 as a diversification effort prior to going public to signal to investors it was well-positioned for whatever transportation trends may emerge over time. But it was always an awkward fit, and a money-losing one to boot. The recent sale to Lime put JUMP’s fate in question.
As for which company is responsible for selling off the bikes and scooters for scrap, Lime says it wasn’t them. “As part of the JUMP acquisition, we took possession of tens of thousands of e-bikes—including the spare parts and tools to fix them—and have already begun to deploy them,” a Lime spokesperson told Motherboard. “We have not recycled any of the JUMP e-bikes in our fleet and are committed to scaling and operating them during this critical time.” The spokesperson added that when the transaction officially closes, Lime plans to work with Uber to “find sustainable ways to donate and re-use any remaining e-bikes in their inventory.”
An Uber spokesperson said the company kept the older models. "We explored donating the remaining, older-model bikes, but given many significant issues—including maintenance, liability, safety concerns, and a lack of consumer-grade charging equipment—we decided the best approach was to responsibly recycle them."
The man at Foss Recycling told Motherboard their contract is not with either Uber or Lime, but with a company called Blue Sky Trading, which is removing and keeping the electronic and battery components. After that, the man said the bikes and scooters will “be shredded through the auto shredder, and the metal will be distributed out from there.”
The mass bike and scooter destruction, especially when demand for biking is at such a height, is yet another piece of evidence that the well-intentioned goals of micromobility workers who believed they were working to promote sustainable transportation does not ultimately align with the goals of the companies they worked for. Last month, Bird laid off more than 400 employees, some of whom openly questioned whether the company could ever achieve the grand vision it sold to investors.
For his part, the former JUMP employee sees this as yet another lost opportunity. “An amazing COVID e-bike program could've done so much good and instead we have horrific images of bikes being eaten by the Claw at the dump. It's a shameful nightmare.”
For five years, Tariq has been a full-time Uber and Lyft driver in New York City. Each year, Tariq has watched his wages slump and his expenses climb. He’s added more hours and days to what was once a 40-hour, five-day work week. Even in the worst moments, though, he never found himself sleeping in his car like some of his driver friends regularly did. Until the “lockout.”
Over the last few years, Tariq joined two groups that represent ride-hail drivers: the New York Taxi Workers Alliance and the Independent Drivers Guild. Both labor groups promised to leverage their large memberships into direct action that would pressure City Hall into finally improving working conditions for ride-hail drivers like him. Their activism led to the introduction of a series of landmark regulations from the New York City Council and Taxi & Limousine Commission (TLC) in August 2018: a cap on the number of ride-hail vehicles, along with a pay floor that promised to drastically improve driver pay.
Almost immediately, ride-hail apps tried and failed to challenge these regulations in court. Over the past nine months, however, they have successfully undercut these rules with a new tiered quota system for drivers. In an attempt to avoid having drivers collecting wages while being underutilized by riders, Uber and Lyft have restricted the number of drivers who can log on at any given time, with preference given to drivers who drive the most.
Ever since these changes were first introduced, Tariq has been sleeping in his car to meet the quotas. It’s not that he’s homeless. Because he has fallen below the top tier of drivers, he tries to be in his car constantly, even if he’s not being paid, so that if he’s suddenly allowed to log on, he can take advantage and have a better chance of moving up the tier system.
“No matter how hard I work, it’s never enough. Every day is about how to get online so I can hit the quota and not be locked out,” Tariq told Motherboard. “Where do I spend hours parked in the day? Where do I spend hours parked at night? When do I use the bathroom? When do I eat? If I hit the quota, I can relax. I can drive whenever I want. If I don’t hit the quota, I get locked out.”
He’s fallen behind on his rent, car insurance, and vehicle payments, putting him dangerously close to having the vehicle remotely deactivated then repossessed.
“I don’t want to sleep in my car, I don’t want to spend most days away from home. But I have to,” Tariq said. “If I don’t hit the quota, I don’t get the right to log on and drive whenever I want. If I can’t drive whenever I want, then I get off-peak hours which means no customers. Which means no money. Which means I spend more hours in my car trying to hit the quota and make a living.”
These changes, called the “lockout” by drivers, have fundamentally changed what ridesharing is. Uber and Lyft have long said that drivers have the flexibility to choose their own hours—this is, in fact, core to their argument that drivers are not “employees” but are instead independent contractors. But new Uber and Lyft policies in New York City not only mean drivers can’t make their own hours, and an increasing number of drivers are driving a minimum of 60 hours a week to avoid having their hours cut on the app.
#DriversUnit caravan around New York City protesting low wages for Uber and Lyft drivers. Spencer Platt / Staff
In conversations with more than a dozen drivers, I learned of a multi-faceted crisis: a failure of the TLC to enforce its own ride-hail app regulations, an unsustainable rat race among drivers to meet the increasingly demanding quotas of Uber and Lyft, poor working conditions in which drivers who supposedly make their own hours have less agency than workers at traditional workplaces, growing financial insecurity, and a rapid decay in the physical and mental health of drivers caught in between exploitative gig platforms and ill-equipped bureaucracies.
All of this, of course, is exacerbated by the ongoing coronavirus crisis, which puts drivers on the front lines of a city that is “social distancing” and avoiding public transit.
Motherboard has granted anonymity to ride-hail drivers who spoke to us for this story, because many of them expressed fear of retribution from Uber and Lyft. Names of drivers have been omitted or changed.
Even drivers who say they like the lockout have a pretty bleak view of what’s happening: “Whether we hate it or love it, this is capitalism in action: strong drivers over weak ones, the wheat from the chaff,” one driver said.
Ride-hailing apps have had a simple strategy in New York City: growth at all costs. By 2019 there were well over 120,000 for-hire vehicles (FHVs) on the road—fewer than 40,000 FHVs existed before Uber’s first NYC experiment with ride-hailing in 2010. As of January, Uber and Lyft make up roughly 97 percent of the city’s daily trips—a far cry from January 2015 (the start of TLC’s data collection), when Uber provided 60,000 daily trips compared to NYC yellow cabs’ 450,000 daily trips.
In a 2019 press conference celebrating victory over the ride-hail companies after new regulations were imposed, Bhavari Desai—executive director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA) labor group—spoke plainly about why she and City Hall were opposed to Uber and Lyft: "Uber and Lyft and their cohorts created a race to the bottom, filling our streets with so many vehicles that no driver could get enough fares to make a living."
Exponential growth, whether in a petri dish or the United States' largest city, is not sustainable. For years, studies have reported the same set of outcomes when ride-hail apps are mass adopted: worse traffic conditions, increases in urban pollution, mass migrations from public and private transit, all paired with bleak unit economics that constantly cut wages while hiking fares. Uber’s commitment to growth manifested differently in its various markets across the world, but in New York City the strategy meant a vicious battle with the city itself. When Mayor Bill de Blasio tried to introduce a vehicle cap in 2015, Uber hired an army of lobbyists and consultants, launched “DeBlasio’s Uber” featuring 25 minute wait times, and “ convinced” the Mayor a study would be best.
For the next three years, the city adopted a relatively laissez-faire approach to ride-hail apps even as it became clear these apps were wreaking havoc on the city and its communities. It took a wave of driver suicides, in-depth coverage of New York City’s taxi medallion bubble, protests and campaigns led by labor groups like the Independent Drivers Guild and NYTWA, and a June 2018 study of proposed pay rules by economists James A. Parrot and Michael Reich to push the TLC to consider action. It’s worth mentioning that the 2018 edition of the TLC's report to the City Council was the first to specifically mention Uber or Lyft—three years after the city’s first effort to regulate the company.
In 2018, City Hall overwhelmingly passed two regulations. The first regulation was a one-year vehicle cap aimed at not only easing endemic congestion, but blocking the flood of FHVs spilling into the streets. The second regulation was permanent pay floor regulation meant to raise the sub-minimum wages which were driving some drivers into despair.
This pay floor used a company’s “utilization rate” as part of a dynamic formula that set payment minimums. The TLC defines a utilization rate as “the share of time drivers spend with passengers.” The thinking here was that, without government regulation, an explosion of unutilized cars would lead to increased congestion and would continue to push wages down as more drivers would be driving without passengers (and thus without fares).
The Parrot-Reich study found that 96 percent of all high-volume FHV drivers made less than $17.22 hourly ($15 after expenses). They proposed to fix that by calculating each company’s utilization rate, then plugging it into a per-minute and per-mile minimum trip payment formula.
A visualization of how the pay floor formula works.
Each company’s specific utilization rates were abysmal: In 2017, Uber and Lyft had a 58 percent utilization rate, while it was 50 percent for Juno, and 70 percent for Via. The incentive, then, was to use utilization rate in the pay floor formula to stop perpetual growth and have drivers spend less time on the road empty, hopefully reducing congestion as well. The lower the utilization rate, the higher the per-trip pay floor. Without these rules and incentives, Parrot told Motherboard, drivers would “continue to subsidize the company as they buy vehicles, maintain them, and drive for sub-minimum pay."
“Before the vehicle cap, the companies were just signing up drivers right and left. That was clearly unsustainable and needed to change. So the [New York City Council] supported a cap on vehicles—the cap didn't come from the Taxi and Limousine Commission, it wasn't their regulation," Parrott said. "The TLC maintained its position that they didn't have the authority—clear-cut authority—to act on their own. So they proceeded to get a handle on the volume of cars to regulate the pay and encourage regulation of vehicles by the companies. It was a set of policies that weren't coordinated from the beginning."
After the vehicle cap and pay floor were passed in 2018, a one-year study of the effects of the vehicle cap and the pay floor’s utilization rate on congestion was carried out and completed by summer 2019. The study’s conclusions made the case for the TLC to propose not only indefinitely extending the cap but adding a “cruising cap” to limit how much time app-based FHVs could drive without passengers in Manhattan south of 96th Street. Within six months, app companies would need to reduce their cars’ time spent idling from 41 percent to 36 percent, then down further to 31 percent within another six months.
Altogether, the regulations promised to radically change the lives of most app drivers by increasing their income, reducing the time they spent empty, and improving working conditions. Already, Uber and Lyft had stopped accepting new drivers because the vehicle cap and pay floor made the companies, not the public, bear the brunt of the cost of perpetual growth. Lyft had tried and failed to block the vehicle cap and pay floor in court, and the cruising cap would surely draw fire from both, but the mood was high when Mayor de Blasio signed laws that made the vehicle caps and pay scheme permanent in June.
“With this new policy, New York City is holding companies accountable for the underutilization of drivers and oversupply of vehicles that have choked the city’s streets,” said Acting TLC Commissioner Bill Heinzen at the time. “This innovative approach represents a major win for our hardworking drivers and the city as a whole. It shows how cities nationwide can take back control of their streets.”
“A cap on new For Hire Vehicles was the first step in stabilizing incomes for drivers in poverty, debt and despair across the industry. And with the minimum payment rates that followed, Uber and Lyft drivers are finally able to see gains,” added Desai, executive director of the NYTWA. “Uber and Lyft and their cohorts created a race to the bottom, filling our streets with so many vehicles that no driver could get enough fares to make a living."
In all the fanfare, however, regulators overlooked the fact that Uber and Lyft became big precisely because they ignored regulations. By the end of the year, both Uber and Lyft were able to kill the cruising cap through the courts. To fight the new pay rules that used low utilization rates to increase driver pay, however, the apps would have to get more creative.
It took Lyft two weeks to undo years of work that made the vehicle cap and pay floor possible. On June 27 of last year, Lyft told its drivers it was introducing a “priority to drive” system: “the number of drivers who can be on the road at any given time will be determined by passenger demand—and spots may be limited. This means if there’s low demand, you may have to drive to busier areas or wait to go online and drive once demand picks back up.”
To achieve and preserve priority to drive, drivers needed an acceptance rate above 90 percent and to complete 100 rides in 30 days. Drivers without priority would only be allowed to drive when there was enough demand. (An exception would be made, however, for drivers who rented a vehicle from Lyft through its Express Drive program, which drivers have long bemoaned for its resulting high costs and low pay.) According to TLC data, the average number of ride-hailing trips per Lyft vehicle in June 2019 was 96. In October, Lyft raised its priority to drive minimum to 180 rides every 30 days. At the time, the average number of trips for Lyft vehicles that month was 113.
In a statement to Motherboard, a Lyft spokeswoman said: “We have said that the TLC’s rules are misguided. To comply with them, we had to make changes to the app, and are working hard to support drivers through these changes.”
In September, Uber announced it would be introducing its own version of priority driving: a “Planner” that would allow drivers to schedule trips for the next week depending on what tier of its quota system a driver achieved last month. In one early communication, Uber pinned the blame on the TLC: “We know that all the changes to the city's regulations since 2018 have been frustrating to drivers, and we're doing our very best to support you as we work to respond to the TLC's rules."
The first tier of drivers would be allowed to go online anytime, but only if they completed 1,000 trips in three months or 250 UberBlack/SUV (luxury) trips. The second tier of drivers, who completed 700 trips or 200 UberBlack/SUV trips in three months, were allowed to reserve shifts in the Planner at 10 AM every Wednesday. Drivers who completed at least 400 trips or 150 UberBlack/SUV trips were slotted into the third tier, allowed to reserve Planner shifts on Thursday at 10 AM each week. Every group was expected to maintain a 4.8 or higher rating; the fourth and final tier comprised drivers who either did not have a 4.8 rating or did not hit the third tier's quota. They would be allowed to reserve shifts after Friday at 10 AM. TLC data indicates the average number of monthly ride-hail trips per Uber vehicle at the time was 191.
Uber's first trip quotas to determine access to the app and its planner.
In February, Uber sent drivers details for its new quota starting in March, which are much higher than the previous quotas: 425 trips or 95 UberBlack/SUV to go online anytime; 285 trips or 65 Black/SUV trips to reserve on Wednesday at 10 AM; 165 trips or 35 UberBlack/SUV trips to reserve on Thursday at 10 AM. Again, each tier would require at least a 4.8 driver rating and anyone below the lowest quota tier or a 4.8 driver rating could only make reservations on Friday at 10 AM. By the end of 2019, TLC data reported that the average number of trips per Uber vehicle barely inched to 214.
Uber's second trip quotas to determine access to the app and its planner.
To go online anytime, drivers have to complete an average of just over 14 rides per day, assuming a 30-day month and that they drive every single day. That means drivers in the top tier work a lot and need to continue working a lot. But they aren’t the ones who have been screwed the worst by this system.
For any driver who is not already in the first tier, it requires a herculean effort to move into it, and it can require a lot of unpaid time sitting in the car. Drivers are given a number of reservation slots—each one allows a driver to log on for one hour. The number of reservation slots drivers are allowed to has fluctuated from 23 to 17 to 14 to 11, and now seven for some. As each tier is allowed to register, there are also substantially fewer slots to reserve; there are weeks when Thursday reservations see either only off-peak times, low-demand times, or no slots at all. If drivers want to make up the difference, they are forced to sit in their car on the app constantly and hope that there will be a shortage of drivers somewhere, sometime, in the city that will unlock their access to the app. For most drivers, this means 60 to 70 hour weeks, every week, to hit a higher tier.
Essentially, many drivers are living in their cars, hoping they’ll be allowed to log in often enough to be able to move up the tier system.
"Uber can control when I work, where I work, how much I get paid. I’m tired, I’m sick, my body hurts and I can’t live like this anymore."
"In the past, I would only drive five or six hours on weeknights, then maybe 10 to 12 hours on weekend nights for extra money. But now, I'm mostly driving 12 hours every day and I'm only taking one day off,” one Uber driver who has been working in the city for two years told Motherboard. “I am scheduling shifts, I am forced to constantly go where Uber needs drivers, I don’t get to control what I do. Not only that, but now I drive 30 to 40 percent more now—and I'm not breaking even by any means. Before the lockout, on average I was making $1,500 each week after vehicle expenses if you include insurance, vehicle rentals, gas, cleaning, all that. Now it's $500 in a good week. I can’t live on that, but I’m trapped paying off this car that I got to drive Uber in the first place!”
After repeated requests for comment, Uber declined to answer detailed questions from Motherboard. Instead, it sent the following statement: "As a result of regulations passed by the TLC and actions taken by one of our competitors, we began limiting access to the driver app in areas and times of low rider demand."
Uber and Lyft’s new policies fly in the face of what they have always insisted is the core of their business model and worker classification: flexibility. At the same time, the New York City experience suggests that there has always existed a core tension between the viability of Uber’s business model and the autonomy (and livelihood) of its drivers.
“Obviously you can’t continue to grow 50 percent a year, indefinitely, forever and ever. When the pay standard was approved in 2019, the market had stabilized. In other places, it's not clear that the growth is continuing in an unsustainable fashion,” said Parrot. “There was this early period where the companies were trying to portray the industry as something where drivers can drive whenever they can please, but that was obviously a myth.”
For years, Uber has always maintained that profitability is just around the corner. At times, it has been necessary to invoke the specter of autonomous vehicles as proof of its inevitable profitability. Its loudest critics, however, have always maintained that not only is Uber a fundamentally unprofitable company but that it operates on bleak unit economics which can only ever improve its margins by cutting driver compensation or hiking fares. This tension between flexibility and profitability becomes clearest, then, when cities like New York block Uber from cutting driver compensation.
“In less regulated markets, Uber's rhetorical claims that drivers are free to log in and logout or free to work at their own discretion are directly contradicted in a city like New York,” said Alex Rosenblat, research lead for Data & Society and author of Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work. “The lockouts make it more explicit that Uber is controlling scheduling. Technically, drivers still have the option to secure shifts in advance, but of course if they can't make those shifts or they try and log in outside of those shifts, then their chances [of getting work] are spontaneous."
Rosenblat’s ethnographic research of ride-hail drivers over the past few years has focused on “algorithmic management,” or the ways in which the Uber/Lyft model of work actually resembles, and in many cases goes further than, traditional dynamics of employment: "I would argue that they're currently controlling labor in lots of ways. By choosing how many drivers to onboard into a given market. By setting the rate that drivers earn—by perennially changing them and often cutting them. By changing the requirements for vehicles. By monitoring their behavior at work, from how quickly they're accelerating to how harshly they're braking, to threatening drivers if they don't perform according to the behavioral standards that were set. That's the basic tenet of the algorithmic management argument.”
In conversations Motherboard had with Uber and Lyft drivers around New York City, there was near-unanimous hatred for the lockout.
“If you don’t already have priority, forget it. It’s not worth it. And by the time I can reserve shifts on the Planner, the busiest slots are already gone. The shifts given by Uber aren’t enough to hit 425 trips in a month, let alone enough to pay my bills!,” one Lyft and Uber driver said while getting ready to sleep in the back of his car. “This is the only way. My entire life revolves around this stupid app if I want to eat, to sleep, to do anything. This isn’t living.”
Feelings ranged from accusatory, with drivers blaming not only Uber and Lyft but New York City regulatory authorities for taking too long to do something the apps broke within a few months, to dejected, as drivers either accepted living in their cars to “earn” the right to drive whenever they wanted or made plans to exit the gig economy industry and find another line of work.
Another driver who’d spent the last three months sleeping in his car in order to take advantage of any demand spikes, was irate when Motherboard met him, specifically because of Uber’s sudden increase in the quotas. “My plan was to work like a slave every day for half a year, maybe more, until I could save enough money to never do this shit again,” he said. “OK, Uber can control when I work, where I work, how much I get paid, alright fine, six months. But I’m tired, I’m sick, my body hurts and I can’t live like this anymore.”
"I would like people to think about the lives of the drivers. Ask what happens to a person when they cannot sleep, cannot eat, cannot shit on their own time. Whether Uber or Lyft or Via or whatever stupid app is worth it."
One driver, Rafael, fancied himself as a sort of “crisis entrepreneur” and explained that “Uber and Lyft are doing this because they fucked up by hiring too many drivers, but they’ll fuck [up] again and cause too many drivers to leave, meaning people like me will be there to eat when there’s too much demand and not enough supply.”
“Supply” is exactly what Uber’s co-founder and former CEO Travis Kalanick called drivers internally years before Uber began scheduling drive shifts in a Planner to minimize labor costs. When that fact was pointed out to Rafael, he responded, “There’s no harm in having clear eyes about how they see us. The real harm comes from people acting out some fantasy of ‘being their own boss’ when the apps control nearly everything.”
While a consistent theme among drivers was the recognition that their labor—and how, when, or where it was used—was not exactly theirs to control, what varied widely was how drivers then rationalized that reality.
"I think no one wants to go to work every day feeling disempowered, right, and I think people often come up with other narratives or other ways to describe their circumstances—usually positively," said Rosenblat. "I think what we are also describing is a very masculine way of approaching work, where you're going to sort of 'take it on the chin' and you're going to self-sweat because you've got a family to support."
Work on these platforms is always thought of in terms of these entrepreneurial narratives that tend to obscure core tensions between flexibility and profitability, or between autonomy and algorithmic management.
"Whether or not you can handle the work is very different as a question than whether you should be deprived of workplace protections, or whether your employer should be providing extra levels of protection,” Rosenblat said.
As Veena Dubal, a law professor at UC Hastings, observes in her case study of the California taxi industry, Drive to Precarity, these conditions are a feature, not bug, of the ride-hailing industry everywhere. When comparing modern conditions to those of pre-union San Francisco taxi workers who struck in 1919, she writes they too "had no set income, paid for their own gasoline, and drove with no regulatory limit on competition. As an additional regression, the [ride-hail] drivers also had to drive their own cars, bear the costs of wear and tear, purchase gas and insurance, and pay for vehicle upkeep."
The Uber model is a return to the norm, not a deviation from it. And with little to no focus on worker classification in New York City, other forces become the target of drivers’ rage and frustration. Drivers take for granted that the “greedy apps,” as some called them, are architects of their misery, but are also quick to blame other drivers, the TLC, the political establishment, and the media. Drivers often expressed frustration that despite the deluge of reporting on poor working conditions, multiple studies empirically proving subminimum wages, a wave of suicides among app-based drivers and traditional taxi drivers, all the exposés on the fundamental exploitation that underwrites the UberLyft business model, and fierce rhetoric from politicians along with rounds of uncoordinated regulations, things have only gotten worse.
“I think the scheduling of drivers is going to be a permanent feature. Otherwise, it’s just that the companies would be leaving it to chance that the supply of drivers is going to match the demand for trips,” Parrot told Motherboard. “There’s a cost to the companies in missing the mark: if they don't have enough drivers, they can’t service demand that exists and lose market share to other companies; if they have too many drivers scheduled at any given time, then they have makeup pay to satisfy the pay standard.”
“There are too many drivers on the road. That, plus not enough demand, plus new minimum wage laws, plus the crooks at the TLC too scared to cap the number of drivers, and what do you get?” one Uber driver who has worked in New York for five years told Motherboard just before he quit driving for the company. “The apps are doing the dirty work for the city. Uber and Lyft get to save their business, the TLC gets to save face, a few thousand drivers get to starve and a few more get to kill themselves—who cares? That's why they haven't enforced the rules for almost a year now!”
The TLC declined to comment on the record for this story.
Drivers have little hope for a fix to this issue. If anything, evidence suggests this development may be permanent, as Parrot suggested earlier.
Since Uber and Lyft stopped accepting new driver applications in April 2019, both apps have each lost over 8,000 drivers. Tariq is now one of them. After years of eking by and after months of sleeping in his car, he can’t take it anymore.
"I can’t lie and say I hated every moment. I like driving, I like talking to people, I like the silence you get sometimes. For me, it was a perfect job on paper. On paper,” Tariq told Motherboard. “But the reality was horrible for me. So, I would like people to think about the lives of the drivers. Ask what happens to a person when they cannot sleep, cannot eat, cannot shit on their own time. Whether Uber or Lyft or Via or whatever stupid app is worth it. You get somewhere quicker, but me? I sleep in the car. I see the Planner in my dreams like I’m some robot. I want to see my daughter and my wife in my dreams. I want to see my country and my home. Yes I’m a driver, but I’m a person too!”
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