Experiencing Uber from the driver’s seat

By Abhishek Baxi

Uber is a nifty way to get around in a city and a global icon for the new-age on-demand economy. In India, the homegrown cab aggregator, Ola, is matching them feature by feature and often argument by argument in legal suits and regulatory disagreements.

Having experienced Uber on my trips abroad, I was one of the first Uber riders in India – by virtue of taking an Uber to the company’s launch event in New Delhi in 2014. Together with Ola, the app-based cab aggregators have changed the way urban Indians hail cabs as well as impacted the service expectation.

On the sidelines of their growth, much has also been said about a unique facet of the service, especially in an emerging economy like India. Young, educated professionals are driving cars for Uber making it the newest white-collar job. In cities like Bangalore, where plenty of graduates eye limited number of jobs, Uber has given them a new lease of life. Uber and Ola have also elevated the status of professional drivers with liberal payouts and incentives. Often you’d ride with drivers who’d tell you that they now own not just one but a couple of cars or so renting them out to other drivers and running their own mini taxi operation under Uber.

Ride-sharing is the next frontier

According to Uber, there are a ton of duplicate rides — passengers wanting to get to the exact same place at the exact same time. With services like uberCOMMUTE and uberPOOL, the company is making it possible for people to share the ride.

Uber launched ride-sharing service, uberPOOL, allowing more than one riders to book the same cab thereby splitting costs while also cutting congestion. Ola too has a similar Ola Share service. More people in fewer cars is a brilliant approach for solving urban commute problems.

“More people would car pool, we’d have less congestion, the air would be less polluted, we’d all live in a better place. The city doesn’t even have to use taxes to make it happen," Travis Kalanick, CEO and founder of Uber Technologies, said at a conference in Brussels a couple of months ago.

What is uberCOMMUTE? 

uberCOMMUTE allows private car owners – people like us – pool their cars on their usual commute by using the Uber platform. While Ola doesn’t allow using private cars for ride-sharing, they did launch a private carpool category which lets car users create groups and pool rides via the app.

Drivers, called uberCOMMUTE partners, sign into the app and tell Uber where they are going and get requests from riders who are traveling in the same direction. For riders, it’s Uber as usual. They simply select UberPOOL, input their destination, and Uber’s algorithms match them with a driver going the same way.

How to get started 

While one would always wish for better public transportation to avoid the menacing traffic jams, uberCOMMUTE is a brilliant way to use technology to help use the existing infrastructure efficiently.

I thought I’ll give it a shot. I was curious, and I thought if the idea goes mainstream, we could actually have lesser cars on the road in the long run. Benefits of carpooling have been long stated, and this was just an ingenious way in that direction.

Signing up for uberCOMMUTE is seamless. All you need to do is download the Uber Partner app (available on Android and iOS), and upload your driving license and car registration certificate. Uber verifies the details in less than two days, and you’re good to go.

Note that cars registered before 2010 are not allowed. Uber also states that drivers cannot bring other passengers into the ride while using uberCOMMUTE. 

The uberCOMMUTE experience

Once all that was done, I was ready to be an ‘uberCOMMUTE partner’ and pick up my first rider. I fired the app, got ‘online’, and set my destination so that only the riders on that route are matched. In a few minutes, the phone started beeping informing me of a prospective rider. I accepted the ride, and headed towards the location to pick him up.

My first apprehension about the entire thing was that most riders would mistake me for a professional driver. From addressing me as bhaiyaa on the first call to sitting on the rear seat… this could be an awkward experience and honestly a slight dent on my ego.

Well, thankfully, Uber took care of this concern. The booking confirmation to the rider informed him that a uberCOMMUTE partner is picking him up, and it would be a good idea to sit in the front seat and strike a conversation. It’s a subtle way, and thankfully my rider understood and was happy to hop on to the front seat. In fact, for the large part of the ride, we actually ended up discussing the service and he quite liked the idea. Similar thing happened on my next ride. The riders though were inquisitive about my motivation to do this. I’d wish Uber would do a better job of educating the riders about this offering and the benefits.

I think my rides went fine since I have an overall 5 star rating. Yes, you’d be rated and you’d have to rate the rider too, just as it happens on a regular Uber ride. I liked that I had someone to chat with during my commute. One of the riders casually asked about the podcast I was listening to, and we spent the entire ride discussing our favorite ones. Another rider, on learning that I was a technology columnist, spent 20 minutes bouncing off the list of phones he had shortlisted since he was looking to buy a new one. I think I helped him in making a decision.

The hitches

It’s not all hunky-dory though. As I said before, Uber needs to promote this concept for more people to accept it. I’m assuming a lot of women riders might not like the idea of taking a ride with a stranger for safety reasons. Although since one is taking an uberPOOL, he or she should already be comfortable with the idea of ‘sharing a ride’ with a stranger.

Did I do it every day during my week or so of experiment? No. A lot of times, after a long day at work, I didn’t go online to pick up a rider to avoid making a detour. No one likes to spend extra time at the wheel in rush hour traffic. Maybe if the algorithms matched better, I would, but it’s not always the case.

And then there is my biggest peeve. There’s no way to learn if the rider would pay in cash or via Paytm before accepting the ride. All my riders paid in cash, and it’s quite awkward accepting cash after ending a ride. If there was one reason I wouldn’t do this going forward, this would be it.

Economics of uberCOMMUTE

I signed up for uberCOMMUTE without any monetary expectation, but after a rider asked me if this was also a financial ‘incentive’, I investigated the breakup of last payments I received.

Uber payouts are calculated as ₹35 as base amount plus ₹7 per km and ₹1 per minute for the ride. I own a Ford EcoSport petrol variant, and the payouts usually don’t cover the entire costs. Then again, its carpooling so it’s essentially about splitting costs.

As is obvious because of the base fare component, shorter rides are more ‘beneficial’. Also, unlike the popular ‘Uber is evil’ perception, surge benefits are passed on to the uberCOMMUTE partners.

The bottom line 

uberCOMMUTE is a brilliant approach to carpooling. Rather than pooling within your limited personal network and managing the scheduling and cost sharing, uberCOMMUTE extends it everyone willing on the road while offering the familiar Uber experience.

Would I continue to be an uberCOMMUTE partner? I’d like to, but I’d really hope Uber will solve the cash payment conundrum. Also, the company needs to do more to spread the word about the service since none of my riders were aware of the specifics.

As more people learn about it, more would warm up to the idea as riders. And more would sign up as partners to help achieve the broader intent of taking a significant number of cars off the road.