[bscphil]

> Part of me thinks Uber could get away with this if they just relaxed some of their current driver policies (e.g. more limited penalties for cancellations). The issue is whether doing so would drastically deteriorate the quality of the service for riders.

I'm going to go with yes. The only times I use ride sharing services (Lyft, not Uber) are in high-density situations like getting to and from the airport. Depending on the hour there will be dozens to hundreds of drivers hovering in the area trying to get rides. As soon as "rider available" appears on screen a dozen different drivers are mashing the accept button.

Up until a year or two ago, the drivers would then see where I want to go and then call me on the phone to say they didn't want to go there, telling me to cancel the ride they had accepted. I systematically refused every time so that (usually after a few minutes) they would give up and cancel it themselves. This would usually happen for 2 or 3 drivers in a row, making ride-sharing a miserable experience for me.

I assume the cancellation penalties have been made much more serious, because this hasn't happened to me in a while now.

[amyjess]

> Up until a year or two ago, the drivers would then see where I want to go and then call me on the phone to say they didn't want to go there, telling me to cancel the ride they had accepted. I systematically refused every time so that (usually after a few minutes) they would give up and cancel it themselves. This would usually happen for 2 or 3 drivers in a row, making ride-sharing a miserable experience for me.

I've only had that happen a couple of times for me, but that's because I'm mostly a Lyft user. What was more common on Lyft was drivers calling me to ask "Where are you going?", and when I'd respond with "I already put my destination into the app", they'd hang up and cancel on me.

Edit: About the cancellation penalties. I don't know about Uber, but on Lyft when I as a rider have to cancel on somebody, I sometimes see options pop up saying "driver asked me to cancel" or "driver is not moving". They know when drivers are using trickery to get out of dinging their cancellation rate. And when I have to cancel for "driver is not moving", I also get a message saying they'll waive the cancellation fee because there was an issue with my ride (note: I get this message before I see the list of cancellation reasons to pick from, not after).

[mynameisvlad]

Oh yeah, they 100% know of all the shit drivers do to get out of cancellation penalties on their end. My favorite is when I actually had to use the "driver is going the wrong way" option when I was looking at a map and had a driver decide to go north up a highway when I was very clearly south of even his starting point.

[aianus]

This comment doesn't make sense to me (as a part time Uber driver myself).

First, the driver doesn't see your destination until he picks you up.

Second, there is no competition or reason to rush to "mash" the button, the ride request is exclusive to you as a driver for the 10 seconds that you see it.

[hailk]

Drivers often call you and ask you where your drop location is. Depending on your answer, they often cancel. Or worse, ask you to cancel. I've even had cancellations after I've sat in the car.

[dahdum]

Lyft is the worst about this, I assumed Uber penalizes them because i can’t recall it happening in the past 6 months with them, but I’ll get back to back Lyft call & cancels.

[Cthulhu_]

Doesn't that basically give them a bad mark and cause the software to no longer give them rides? I mean that's grounds for firing if it was a regular taxi company.

[hailk]

I'm not based out of US, so the experience will vary. My understanding of drivers getting bad marked is that here the demand for Uber at peak times is still larger than the supply, hence even though you might be penalised via de-prioritisation, uber would still get you a ride to fulfil. They are also penalised by being given lower pay incentives. But talking to most drivers, the trade-offs of cancelling are worth it for them, since they often cancel drop locations from where demand would be lower, or to far off places where they wouldn't get another ride to complete, or have to go out of the way to return to the area they generally are comfortable operating in.

Whenever I've raised this issue with Uber(via their absurdly bad support feature), I generally get an automated response in the line of "We're so sorry for the bad experience, we understand that this has caused you a lot of trouble... We take your feedback seriously..", etc.

[bscphil]

> This comment doesn't make sense to me (as a part time Uber driver myself).

As I noted in the comment, I use Lyft, not Uber, so I can't say if it works differently. What I can say (and what other people in this thread have confirmed) is that it does happen surprisingly regularly.

> First, the driver doesn't see your destination until he picks you up.

If that's the case, it's easy to see how even on Uber a driver might call you to find out where you want to go, and then tell you to cancel because they don't want to go there.

[m-ee]

Oddly enough cancellations have been much worse for me this year when trying to go from SF->Oakland. Most infuriating is when drivers come close enough to lie and say they're at the pickup spot (showing them my destination) then just drive away without stopping. I mostly use Lyft, so I'm not sure if this is a problem with Uber as well.

[dahdum]

I noted elsewhere, but for me it’s super common with Lyft and super rare with Uber.

[seanmcdirmid]

Doesn’t Uber in the USA just assign rides automatically? Or do drivers opt into the rides they want? But what you describe is how didi works in China when interfacing with taxis (you could get a taxi or ride share through the app, drivers will simply ack any rides they want to take, payment is handled normally, didi doesn’t get a cut).

[grandmczeb]

Uber presents a ride to the driver through the app and the drivers must accept the rides they want to take[1]

[1] https://help.uber.com/partners/article/getting-a-trip-reques...

[dnautics]

Yeah but it's round robin. You don't lose a ride by not mashing the button quickly enough.

[TeMPOraL]

Wouldn't surprise me if both were true, and they A/B-tested it by region.