Uber drivers may be making a fair amount of money in the Bluff City but not quite as much as cities like New York and Chicago, where drivers can consistently make more than $20 per hour.
With swipes and clicks Memphians have been using the app to hail rides since its Bluff City debut in April 2014, and although local Uber drivers contend that business has been picking up in the past six months, the San Francisco-based service is still reported to be more lucrative for drivers in some of the nation’s largest metro areas.
“It’s gonna vary from city to city simply because the size of the city and the number of airports certain cities have,” Memphian Gary Hager, 62, who has been driving for Uber since May 2014, said.
“The bigger airports are going to have a lot more pickups because of the number of flights that are taking off and arriving at those airports,” Hager said. “Consequently, those drivers can probably make a higher amount of money because there’s more pickups and, secondly, because of the mileage between an airport and a destination.”
An analysis of the labor market for Uber’s driver-partners in the United States written by Jonathan Hall, head of policy research at Uber Technologies, and Alan Krueger, the Bendheim professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton, found that among the six largest market cities for Uber, drivers who work 16 to 34 hours a week on average earn an hourly wage of $20.84.
But Hager said a Memphis Uber driver like him, driving “kind of part time,” works about 33 hours during the week and makes from $350 to $450 a week.
On average a 16-34 hour-range Memphis Uber driver, like Hager, are likely to make an hourly wage of $13 - less than any of Uber’s top six market cities.
He said the distance between cities and their major airports also factor into those earnings. “I know that the Denver airport is about 40 minutes away from downtown Denver,” Hager said. “An Uber driver is going to make a real good fair because he’s driving a good distance for that. New York City – you have Laguardia and Kennedy that are a fair distance from downtown Manhattan. The airports come into play a lot as far as what the drivers are able to make.” Although Uber drivers in Manhattan might be driving longer distances and on average making a larger fare than drivers in Memphis, Uber riders in the Bluff City seem to be taking advantage of the service at an increasing rate. Amanda Bergstrom, 22, “Ubers” between four and six times a weekand multiple times a day, “give or take.” She shared why she prefers using Uber over conventional taxi services. “It’s cheaper by far,” Bergstrom said. “They’re fast. They get to your door within four, five, or six minutes – they’ll surprise you like that. The fare’s way lower. It’s just convenient.” Bergstrom, who has been using the service for about eight months, found Uber was the perfect solution when her car stopped running. “I hear a lot of people saying that it’s cheaper than even just owning your own car,” Bergstrom said. “You don’t have to worry about insurance or gas or any of that. It’s almost a flat rate, and you can estimate how much you’re probably gonna be spending.” Hager, who has driven around 1,300 Uber riders, contended that in the past six months, business has certainly grown, and Uber is steadily becoming a hit via word of mouth in the city. “When I first started driving, I would get a signal for a pickup, and I would go make that pick up, deliver the rider for their destination, and it may an hour before I got another request for a ride,” Hager said. “Now it’s fairly constant. I can drop someone off and within minutes have another request for a ride.” Still, the driver was no stranger to the amount of competition for Uber’s service in Memphis. “You have taxis, you have MATA busses, and you have the competitor for Uber, which is Lyft,” Hager said. “I can’t unequivocally say, but I can tell you from what I’ve seen, that Uber is much, much more popular than Lyft. The drivers who drive a lot can make pretty good money.” These Uber drivers generally make more money by driving during specific times or “peak hours”- Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights between midnight and three am. “There’s a lot of nightclub activity down on Beale Street and Overton Square,” Hager said. “People are out partying. I prefer to leave that to the younger drivers, and I just drive during the day.” Rates for Uber riders will also fluctuate in different areas, depending on “surge pricing.” Hager explained why at 4:32pm on a Thursday, Midtown had a 1.4 percent charge. “It’s supply and demand in that there are more people looking at the application considering requesting a ride than there are drivers in that general area,” he said. “During events like Memphis in May, Memphis Tiger football games like Memphis and Ole Miss, concerts, late nights on Friday and Saturday nights – that’s when most of the surge charges show up, because there’s fewer drivers and more people wanting rides.” An Uber driver’s rating might also affect the amount of business they receive. “Whenever I give someone an Uber ride, before I can close out the fare, I have to rate the riders on a one to five scale,” he said. “The riders on the other hand, before they can request another ride, have to do the same thing. The driver is rating the riders, the riders are rating the drivers, and so we get a report stating what our driver rating was the previous week.” Hager, who holds an overall driver rating of 4.89 out of 5, has experienced at least one rider he gave a poor rating to and even reported to Uber. He said that early one morning the rider continuously called and cancelled rides from him sounding “totally out of it,” but this stigma does not represent the vast majority of Memphis Uber riders. “People ask me all the time ‘aren’t you scared letting some stranger in your car?” he said. “Out of all the 1,300 riders that I’ve had, I can count the number of sketchy or scary riders on one hand. Those four or five riders - they turned out to be OK.” Though Uber drivers in Chicago, a bit closer to Memphis than New York, still make better hourly wages than Memphis, Hager contends that he is quite satisfied with living in the Bluff City, mostly because of his family roots. “I like to think that I know this city very well because I’ve lived here for 40 plus years,” Hager said. “But I have discovered areas of the city that I never knew about, both good and bad. I’m thoroughly enjoying it. I encourage anybody who wants to make a little extra money, whether they work a job or are unemployed, they may want to look into being a driver.”
