the best part is, some of us drivers have largely already figured out they do this and have to pay for a second app, Maxymo, to automatically do math and see if a ride is worth a certain $/hr, and accept/decline based on this.

Every now and then, Lyft will try to goad me into accepting offers that would pay, over time, about half as much as what I normally get (Uber, unsurprisingly, always offers me less, so I don’t drive for them), and I can’t focus on driving and do mental math at the same time. This wouldn’t be necessary if they just paid fixed rates based on distance and demand, or gave drivers control over what they want to charge for a ride like an actual contractor, but that doesn’t make shareholders happy.

edit: on a saturday night, the second I go online, Lyft just took me for a $20 ride into the middle of the city (where I thought I was gonna get good rides thereafter) only to immediately sit and think about life for 30 minutes. Tons of pickups happened around me, with zero rides being assigned to me, before I just decided to go back home.

And Lyft is the better of the two rideshare platforms for this.