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Comment by flerchin | Hacker News Reader

There is a model where a driver picks up the uber app and drives a couple times a month because it's a way to earn beer money once in a while. What percentage of trips do we think are driven by drivers like this? I bet a small percentage, maybe less than 1%.

Once a driver starts driving more than 30 hours a week for Uber, they're effectively Uber Drivers, and the employment concept starts to make sense.

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This is probably simmilar to what happened with AirBnb - in the beginning it was about renting your house from time to time. Nowadays, it's mostly professionals who own / manage several properties which are exclusively being rented on Airbnb.

I wouldn't mind a platform that tries to bring back the old model - perhaps by limiting the amount of time a property can be made available, or something along those lines?

Kindred is an attempt at that: https://livekindred.com/.

I rented an Airbnb in downtown Lisbon some years ago (2016 perhaps?), and was actually welcomed by the owning company's MD who told me they'd purchased _75_ apartments in and around Bairro Alto in the year leading up to my stay. The unpreparedness of legislation was wild.

> more than 30 hours a week for Uber, they're effectively Uber Drivers

Every Uber driver I've ever had also did Lyft and would go with whichever was paying better or more active or would get them where they needed to be at the time. So even if they're driving 30 hours a week, that time is split between two companies.

One of my Uber drivers just drove during school hours as he dropped his grandchildren off at school and then picked them up at the end of the day.

But nearly all my Uber drivers have been immigrants working full time or more.

The issue with this is that it's illegal in a bunch of places.

I would love to drive for Uber when I have a bit of free time, but I'd need a licence from my local authority, and taxi insurance which is unrealistically expensive to obtain on a ride by ride basis.

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