As a part-time Uber driver since 2015, I've had a lot of fun, made decent money on the side and did my small part to destroy the taxicab racket that screwed Pittsburghers for 80 years.
I’ve always been a big fan and unapologetic defender of Uber and ride-hailing in general.
As a libertarian journalist who knew how awful America’s legacy taxi industry was, I was thrilled to see Uber and its revolutionary rider and driver apps come along in the mid-2010s.
I cheered as, city-by-city, Uber destroyed a government-protected taxicab racket that for almost a century had been screwing poor and carless citizens of America with high fares, too few taxis and horrible, often racist, service.
If you’re under 30 you know what Uber’s all about and you’ve come to take its miraculous services for granted. But ask your parents or grandparents how tough they had it when they wanted a taxicab.
Pittsburgh, my home town, is one of the best examples of how awful monopoly taxis were until Uber came along in 2014.
Back then local people and tourists to the Steel City were still trapped in the Dark Ages of the Taxicab Era. Since the 1930s state laws had given the Yellow Cab Company of Pittsburgh a virtual monopoly over the city’s taxi service, and Yellow Cab abused their power absolutely.
Other cities’ taxi services were just as bad as Pittsburgh, but none was worse.
At least that’s what I and my friend Cristina Rouvalis proved in 1994 when we wrote a gigantic two-day front-page expose of Yellow Cab of Pittsburgh for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette called “Rough Ride.”
Without much trouble, we showed that Pittsburgh was arguably the worst taxi town in North America.
Pittsburgh had some of the highest fares, the oldest cabs and the fewest cabs per capita – fewer than 300 legal cabs for Allegheny County’s population of 1.3 million. Taxi drivers paid high daily lease rates to lease rehabbed Yellow cabs from New York City and old police cars with 200,000 miles on them.
People living in poor and especially black city neighborhoods had a reliable but illegal 24/7 black market car service called jitneys — and they still do. But they were ignored by Yellow Cab. So were suburbanites. Believe it or not, until the early 21st century, it was actually illegal to hail a taxi in Pittsburgh.
That explains why every so often a black businessman would come to town, try in vain to hail a cab on a downtown corner and write a letter to the paper blasting Pittsburgh as racist town.
Our gigantic front-page consumer “expose” in the Post-Gazette about the multiple awfulness of taxis had no impact. The other news media did nothing. The state regulators did nothing.
Nothing changed for the better until Uber blew into town in 2014. Because its outlaw executives boldly flouted the state laws that protected Yellow Cab and prohibited anyone from competing with it, Uber quickly liberated tens of thousands of Pittsburghers a week from decades of Taxi Tyranny.
I started working as a part-time Uber driver in Pittsburgh in January 2015.
My Uber career was put on permanent pause on St. Patrick’s Day 2020, when the state lockdowns wiped out most of the city’s business and social life and crushed the ride-hailing business. The ride-hailing business is coming back slowly as the economy improves.
The big problem now is that there are too few drivers to meet the growing demand — which is why prices are higher for riders than they should be. Nevertheless, ubering has been a great part-time gig for a retired newspaperman. I hope that’s still true by next St. Patrick’s Day.
Motley Fool’s experts think that now that the worst of the Covid-19 lockdowns are over Uber will resume its so-far unprofitable cruise down the road to becoming the Amazon of Transportation in 2021. While Uber’s ridership numbers plummetted nearly 50 percent in 2020, its food delivery service Uber Eats — which is also delivering booze and pharmacy products — grew significantly. Uber’s total earnings were flat for 2020 and its CEO Dara Khosrowshahi says he is confident Uber will thrive in 2021 by focusing on mobility and delivery.
Anatomy of an Uber ride
Yes, I’m ‘William the Uberman’ – Bill, really. One of you is Megan, right? And we’re headed Downtown to Market Square?
Temperature OK back there? Open a window if you need to. There’s water too if you want it. There’s a special tonight – just $3.99 a bottle. Just kidding, guys – girls, ladies?
‘How long have I been driving for Uber?’
Five years -- since January of 2015.
‘Do I like it?’ Yes. It’s a great part-time job, especially for an old ex-newspaper guy who likes to meet and gently interrogate random strangers from around the world.
It’s also a great way to see Pittsburgh and its people. I used to stay out till 2 or 3 in the morning. Now I work Friday and Saturday nights from 4 p.m. to 11.
‘Have I picked up anyone really famous?’
Not unless you count Olli Matta who used to play for the Pens or my brother Paul the Pens’ TV play-by-play guy.
But I figure I’ve met eleven thousand humans from 35 countries and every city neighborhood, suburb and dead steel town in Metro Pittsburgh. Only 10 of them were sub-human. That’s my big joke.
Seriously, though, 99.99 percent of my passengers have been nice people. Polite. Friendly. Interesting. Smart. Infinitely unique. Drunk and sober. They still skew young and female. But I’ve picked up every sex, class, color, occupation and lifestyle.
‘Like who’?
Thousands of Pitt and CMU students, probably a third from China and India. Hundreds of tourists. Steelers fans in from Mexico City, Pens fans in from Toronto. High school kids. Consultants. PNC numbers crunchers. Bartenders. Lawyers. Lawrenceville house flippers. Teenage single mothers and their screaming babies. Blind couples with their service dogs. Ninety-year-old grandmas. Symphony musicians with their trombones. Drilling engineers and gas frackers. Strippers to heart transplant surgeons, I like to say.
‘Do I have any ‘Uber horror stories’ to share?
No. Sorry. No car jackings, no hold-ups, no fist-fights with drunk frat boys. Just a few obvious minor drug buys that I accidentally helped go down. I’m kind of ashamed after all this time my Uber career has been so boring.
One of the most disturbing trips I had was with a mother and her evil drunk son. He looked 18, acted five but was really 35. He was drunk and nasty at 4 in the afternoon. I took them from Downtown to a big house in Shady Side. All he did was m-f his mom and berate her about scandalous family stuff.
The poor mother just sat there and said over and over, “I’m sorry, sir. I apologize for my son, sir.”
At one point the punk son said, “Shut up, mother, or I’ll tell Biilllll here how you steal gold from people’s mouths.”
I have no idea what that meant. It was sick. I should have kicked him out of the car – or kicked his ass – but I ubered on.
The only time I was ever worried for my safety was the time I picked up some crazy drunk white guy on a Saturday afternoon. He wanted to go to a black bar in the West End. He said over and over he was going to go in the bar and shoot some black guys. Only he didn’t say “black.” He called his girlfriend and told her the same thing about ten times.
He was high on something. He never stopped jabbering. When he wasn’t telling me who he was going to kill, he was thanking me profusely for picking him up. I didn’t see a gun or anything. I dropped him in the gravel parking lot of a rough looking bar.
No. I didn’t rate him a one star. I give everyone a five unless they have sex in my backseat without permission. Just kidding.
You guys look kind of young and innocent. I probably shouldn’t tell you. But I did have a creepy young businessman from PPG have some kind of quickie sex with his girlfriend in the backseat. It was after work – during the day. He asked me for permission “to pleasure” her.
‘OOOO.’
OOOO is right. But he wasn’t kidding. I just said OK and turned up the radio. What was I supposed to do? We were going 60 on the Parkway West. I have no idea what he did. I kept my eyes on the road. When they went into her apartment they each forgot their umbrellas.
I’ve had two riders kiss me. One was the leader of a four-pack of tipsy Pitt sorority girls who asked permission. She thanked me by burning a huge red-lipstick kiss on my cheek and taking my photo.
The other kiss was by a semi-inebriated middle-aged guy the size of Ben Roethlisberger.
He was so grateful I delivered him, his wife and friends to the Rivers Casino that he gently grabbed my head with both hands, kissed me on the forehead and handed me the $38 ball of bills he’d collected from the others.
Those kisses were the early days when I’d be greeted like a superhero by the older college girls – “Uberman! Thanks for picking us up!” I’d bait them and ask, “Why didn’t you order a taxi?” Then I’d hear each of their taxi horror stories.
Cabs in every city were awful before Uber, but Pittsburgh had some of the highest fares, worst service and crappiest cabs. Cabbies refused short trips. City residents and suburbanites were all mistreated equally by Yellow Cab. For about eight decades.
Until Uber and Lyft and their magic apps came to town there were fewer than 300 legal cabs “serving” 1.3 million people in Allegheny County. Now there are about 5,000 full- and part-time Uber/Lyft drivers like me and my wife Trudi.
You guys are lucky. You’ll never have to call a taxi again.
I, Uberman
Last fall, as the lockdowns dragged on and Uber’s ride-hailing business in Pittsburgh was crushed (because of near-zero weekend nightlife, no ball games, far fewer commuters, reduced air travel) I wrote a version of this piece about my five-year Uber career for Pittsburgh magazine.
In the last four years, I haven’t been kissed by a single grateful passenger.
I haven’t been invited to eat dinner at a big Italian pool party in the suburbs.
And I’m no longer greeted like a superhero by tipsy college girls from the University of Pittsburgh.
Being an Uber driver today is nowhere near as exciting or romantic as it was in 2015, my rookie year, when ride-hailing was new, still magical and barely legal in Pittsburgh.
Until the war on Covid-19 shut down most of the city overnight at this time last year, being an uberman was a perfect part-time job for an ex-journalist. As a 1099 independent contract driver, I have maximum flexibility and a really great boss – me.
Pittsburgh’s social and economic life is slowly being liberated from the state’s overly strict lockdown, but the Uber business is still badly depressed. People still aren’t commuting, flying out of town or going out to dinner or ballgames at anything close to the rate they were a year ago.
Until I stopped ubering the weekend after St. Patrick’s Day (in 2020), I usually drove Fridays and Saturdays from about 4 p.m. to midnight. So did my wife Trudi, aka Uberwoman. With tips and incentives from Uber, we each averaged around $25 an hour, minus gas, depreciation and other extra expenses on cars we already owned.
But it’s not the money I like, it is the whole gig. I like to drive – even on Pittsburgh’s horrible roads. I also enjoy meeting and gently interrogating 20 or 30 random strangers each weekend.
I figure I’ve met roughly 11,000 of my fellow humans. Sober or drunk, yinzers or out-of-towners, they came in every sex, age, class, color, ethnicity, lifestyle and occupation -- strippers to heart transplant surgeons.
They’ve hailed from 40 countries, dozens of U.S. states and every city neighborhood, college campus, dark suburb and dead steel town in Western Pa.
I’m ashamed to say I have no dramatic Uber stories to tell. No guns pulled, no Denzel Washington, not a single ticket for thousands of minor traffic crimes. I haven’t put a single scratch on my ubermobile or a pedestrian.
Uber’s early corporate life was not perfect. Feel free to Google the unflattering details. And it’s true ride-hailing imposes social costs – or did, pre-Covid. It added to rush-hour congestion, for example, and lured riders from Port Authority buses and the T (trolley).
But the downsides of Uber and Lyft were dwarfed by their broad social benefits. Their apps and business models liberated hundreds of thousands of Pittsburghers – particularly young women, blacks, poor people, suburbanites and college kids -- from nearly a century of taxicab tyranny and neglect.
Back 2014, when Uber arrived in Pittsburgh, Mayor Bill Peduto was the only person over 30 who knew how to order an Uber.
As in most cities, college kids were the first demographic to discover that Uber and its smaller competitor Lyft were miraculous alternatives to the city’s infamously scarce, crappy and reliably unreliable taxicabs.
When I’d pick up the older Pitt girls who regularly traveled in packs to Downtown or the South Side they’d sometimes greet me with cries of “Uberman!”
As they hopped into my Honda CRV, I’d often bait them.
“Why didn’t you guys just order a Yellow Cab?”
Then I’d hear a chorus of personal horror stories.
Taxicabs arriving two hours late -- or never…. Walking home from somewhere sketchy at 2 in the morning…. Jumping into a stranger’s minivan after a night of bar crawling on Carson Street and paying $20 for a ride to Oakland ….
Five years later the thrill of ride-hailing is long gone for most Pittsburghers under 30. They’re still grateful to be picked up. But for them – and many of their parents -- Uber has become a given. A verb.
But even after driving 7,000 trips for Uber (and 150 Lyft trips) you’ll never catch me taking either company for granted. Every day I’m thankful they came to Pittsburgh.
When Uber and Lyft arrived in 2014, there were fewer than 300 legal cabs “serving” 1.3 million people in Allegheny County. Before the pandemic hit, Uber HQs said it had about 5,000 active drivers here -- eighty percent part-timers. Pittsburghers took about 100,000 Uber rides a week.
It’s going to be a while before Uber carries that many riders again. But its invisible network of reliable micro-transit has transformed Metro Pittsburgh forever.
Uber and Lyft energized Downtown’s nightlife, made commuting faster and easier and took so many drunks off the road that some suburban police departments have seen their DUIs drop by 50 percent.
For 250 weekends I saw firsthand how Uber and Lyft made Pittsburgh a more livable place. I’ve been proud to do my bit and hope to resume my career soon.
Sometimes I’m a social worker. Sometimes a babysitter. Sometimes I’m a tour guide or a slightly subversive local historian. Sometimes I’m just the driver.
