Wednesday, April 5, 2017

How You Can Tell If Uber Is Overcharging You

I know, I know!

 -Fortune, Dec. 20, 2016
 from a post on a possible path to profitability

No?
From Quartz:

Your Uber drivers knows when Uber is overcharging you
Late one night in January I took an UberPool home from a bar in Brooklyn. The on-demand car-pooling service Uber launched in 2014 is still a novelty in a city historically dominated by yellow cabs and the other two passengers in my car peppered our driver, Kevin, with questions. They were curious whether he liked working for Uber, and how much he would make for our three-stop journey.

I was the last drop-off that night, and I asked Kevin if I could stick around to compare what he earned with what we had paid. He agreed, so we sat in his car and waited for the trip summary to appear. Once it did, we noticed something odd: Uber had charged me $11.46, but it told Kevin my fare was $10.26, of which he got $7.30. The difference—$1.20, or 10% of what I paid—was unaccounted for.

Uber drivers across the US have reported similar discrepancies. Last September, The Rideshare Guy, a popular blog for drivers, detailed four instances in which Uber paid a driver based on a lower fare than what it charged to the rider. This February, Martin Dulberg, an Uber driver in Raleigh, North Carolina, sued Uber in federal court in California over similar fare disparities. The class-action suit alleges that Uber is contractually obligated to pay drivers based on the fare charged to passengers, not a separate calculation of miles and minutes driven....MORE
Quartz went and changed the headline on us. The original URL was:

https://qz.com/948785/how-to-tell-when-ubers-upfront-pricing-is-overcharging-you/