[carlob]

As a matter of fact I know of one person who met a driver through Uber and decided to hire them daily to get to their job without going through Uber ever again. I think that this is extremely rare and that everything in Uber is set up to prevent something like this. Same thing goes for Airbnb and the obfuscation of emails.

[spookthesunset]

It is rare. The reason Uber and Lyft don’t have the same “work outside the network” problem that Wag / Airbnb does is because when you want a ride you want it now. If you had to wait for your “personal” driver to free up, you’d be waiting... or have to deal with scheduling in advance.

You schedule dog walks and lodging in advance, so it is quite tempting to cut the middle man out once you find what you like. Not so with transportation.

[staticautomatic]

It used to be more common. Back when it was all town cars, and up through the early days of UberX, I frequently got business cards and phone numbers from my drivers.

[epmaybe]

I think it's actually a violation of the uber TOS for the driver to circumvent the app, and of the passenger not following the community guidelines of Uber, if I understand correctly. Similar to how Wag's new TOS tries to prevent contractors from seeking pet walking outside of the service.

[dnautics]

I did this a few times (no ongoing commitments) when I was a Lyft driver.