Before the Sun on Tuesday could have risen over the Los Angeles International Airport, they created hundreds of Uber and Lyft drivers near the block and stretched around the block. It was 5 o’clock in the morning and the waiting game began to begin.
Within minutes, the car line would be included in the fenced parking lot, a kilometer from the arrival terminals. It is officially known as Transportation Network Company, but drivers call it a “pen” where they wait for passengers to leave flights.
The place used to be the main place to capture driving and make decent money. But these days it seems that there are few rides. Veronica Hernandez, 50, was parked by White Chevy Malibu at 5:26 in the morning and opened the Lyft application to check her place in the queue: 156 .. It would be an hour and a half before her first ride of the day.
“You have good and bad days,” said Mrs. Hernandez, running over the screen and showing her daily income in the application that week: $ 205, $ 245, $ 179. “Hopefully this is a good day.”
Like drivers with driving all over the country, Mrs. Hernandez has seen a salary drop in recent years, although the demand for her work feels greater than ever. And with the increasing costs of gas and car insurance, the already small margins of the concert work are less processable, she said. No place is more symboling of these problems than lax, one of the busiest airports in the world, but one of the most difficult places for concert workers to earn a living.
“It was a real way to make money,” Mrs. Hernandez said. “Now you can hardly survive.”
In the first years of platforms based on applications such as Uber, Lyft and Doordash, people threw themselves to register as drivers. The idea of making money simply by attracting many professional drivers in your car, according to your own schedule, who were looking for further work, employees working in the service industry who realized they could free themselves from Grind 9 to 5.
The key concept was that drivers will be independent suppliers who are responsible for their own expenses, without health insurance or other benefits of employees, but to work with flexibility for any hours without having to sign up or have a boss.
And in the early years the wages were high. Drivers would regularly take thousands of dollars a week, because Uber and Lyft shifted the growth of profits and broadcast quarterly losses in billions of dollars. After becoming public companies, profitability became a focus and wages gradually decreased.
Now the earnings lagged behind inflation and decreased for many drivers. Last year, Uber drivers reached an average of $ 513 per week in gross earnings, a decrease of 3.4 percent compared to the previous year, although they worked on average six minutes more a week, according to GridWis, an application that collects data and helps drivers to monitor their earnings. For Los Angeles drivers, the average hourly earnings for Uber will decrease by 21 percent since 2021, GridWise found.
Lax introduced the new system in 2019 in an effort to reduce the bumper on the bumper at the terminal. Instead of picking up Uber and Lyft drivers on the curb, passengers must walk or take the shuttle from their terminal to the LAX-IT, next to Terminal 1, which may take up to 20 minutes. But the side of the equation driver is something that passengers rarely see.
That morning, inside the plot, with hundreds of parked cars and the scents of port-and-Potties, was grim mood. The drivers waited for hours to go on rides – “unicorn”, they told them – that would pay them a decent wage of more than $ 1.50 per mile.
Within 10 hours the pen was transferred to the chaos. While around 300 drivers await the virtual front at a given time, the parking lot has only about 200 seats. So, as new cars were filed, they were passing twice cars that were already there, which had to leave a lot to pick up the passengers. The result: Honking and screaming, drowned only by the roar of jet aircraft overhead, which arrived approximately every two minutes.
Sergio Avedian, a concert driver and a blog founder with a series of series WeirHe settled in the pen of recent Tuesday morning at 10:36. After finding a parking space, he opened the front – 256. In a row.
When he watched Uber and Lyft, they discovered rides that drivers rejected in the queue. However, the rates were deplorable: $ 9.87 for $ 13 million, $ 19.97 for 25 miles and so on. He refused all of them.
“We call it” drop and fold down, “said Mr. Avedian, and lowered his front seat.
To run time, groups of drivers smoke cigarettes and play cards. Some take a nap in your cars or watch videos on YouTube. Others roam around chargers to Hawking phone and car cleaning products. Occasionally, arguments between different groups – sometimes along racial lines – break out when competition on rare trips increases sharply.
There is a separate economy in Peru that feeds drivers. Outside the parking lots are TACO trucks, but inside some women sell Chinese food from their cars and trade with plastic bowls Wonton Soup for cash.
Some drivers took their frustration by scribling curse against Uber and its managers on the walls inside the port-and-pot and lamented over an hourly rides that do not lead to any tips or days when they were locked from their accounts without explanation.
Andrias sat in the trunk of his Toyota Sienna and Andrias smoked a cigarette as he refreshed his Uber app. Mr. Andrias, 57 of Iran, said he could earn $ 3,000 a week before the expenses that have been in front of the pandemic, but that has decreased significantly since then. He turned his new weekly earnings on his phone: $ 1,670, $ 1,700, $ 1,053.
“You have to worry about your family,” said Andrias, who has a wife and daughter, and more than $ 7,000 in car payments and rent. “I can’t do right now.”
The New York Times first asked Uber about Lax management conditions in 2023 and said the company was aware of the continuing problems. Since then, however, much has not changed.
Uber said that various factors were responsible for lower wages and that its takeover – the percentage of the fare of every ride it maintained for itself – did not increase in Los Angeles. The cost of liability insurance, the company said, rising and now representing 43 percent of the rider’s fare.
The company also stated that a surcharge of $ 4 for Lax bike drivers along with a new pick -up system significantly reduced demand for airport rides.
The Lax’s Public Relations Division did not respond to a comment request.
Lyft CJ Macklin spokesman said the company was working with LAX to develop a new holding for drivers with a ride that would be built as part of the new airport building project, which includes a light railway between terminals and should reduce traffic.
“A year after now, Lax will look completely different and we are excited about the smoother and faster experience for drivers, riders and the whole city,” said Uber Meghan Casserly, Uber.
There was a ubiquitous feeling of slowness in the land; It seemed that dissatisfaction and hours of waiting forced the driver to inactivity, although the seemingly decent ride rang on their phones.
“There are drivers who really do not know what they are doing and end up on the land just because they know nothing better,” said Pablo Gomez, a Uber driver who visits lax. “They dropped out of the passenger, he said he was going a lot, and they were like,” Okay. “They don’t even know what they are waiting for.”
Driver advisors like Mr. Avedian and Mr. Gomez are trying to help drivers strategize and use the maximum of their time. But Mr. Gomez also empaths with drivers who are still praying for unexpected. He used to be a compulsive player, he said, and driving for Uber feels similar.
“The loss of time is part of this psychology of a drug addict. You are chasing the ride, the score,” he said.
At 2 o’clock in the morning, when the pen closed, some drivers went to look for a parking space in the neighborhood where they would sleep in their cars until the land reopen at 5.
Mrs. Hernandez sat on Tuesday on the hood of her car, when she hit 23 hours, her time to go home. She watched the offers against the wallpaper of her two children aged 25 and 26 years on her phone. She checked her e -mail between the rides and hoped to learn from jobs she recently applied for in the office and warehouse.
In the end there was a ride that would bring her to her home in Montebell, a 50 -minute drive to the east. It was just $ 28 for $ 27 million from the unicorn-but she accepted.
“It’s not the best rate,” she said. “But you have to do it for being worth your time.”
