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Comment by aianus | Hacker News Reader

This comment doesn't make sense to me (as a part time Uber driver myself).

First, the driver doesn't see your destination until he picks you up.

Second, there is no competition or reason to rush to "mash" the button, the ride request is exclusive to you as a driver for the 10 seconds that you see it.

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Drivers often call you and ask you where your drop location is. Depending on your answer, they often cancel. Or worse, ask you to cancel. I've even had cancellations after I've sat in the car.

Doesn't that basically give them a bad mark and cause the software to no longer give them rides? I mean that's grounds for firing if it was a regular taxi company.

I'm not based out of US, so the experience will vary. My understanding of drivers getting bad marked is that here the demand for Uber at peak times is still larger than the supply, hence even though you might be penalised via de-prioritisation, uber would still get you a ride to fulfil. They are also penalised by being given lower pay incentives. But talking to most drivers, the trade-offs of cancelling are worth it for them, since they often cancel drop locations from where demand would be lower, or to far off places where they wouldn't get another ride to complete, or have to go out of the way to return to the area they generally are comfortable operating in.

Whenever I've raised this issue with Uber(via their absurdly bad support feature), I generally get an automated response in the line of "We're so sorry for the bad experience, we understand that this has caused you a lot of trouble... We take your feedback seriously..", etc.

Lyft is the worst about this, I assumed Uber penalizes them because i can’t recall it happening in the past 6 months with them, but I’ll get back to back Lyft call & cancels.

> This comment doesn't make sense to me (as a part time Uber driver myself).

As I noted in the comment, I use Lyft, not Uber, so I can't say if it works differently. What I can say (and what other people in this thread have confirmed) is that it does happen surprisingly regularly.

> First, the driver doesn't see your destination until he picks you up.

If that's the case, it's easy to see how even on Uber a driver might call you to find out where you want to go, and then tell you to cancel because they don't want to go there.

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