One more byproduct of hybrid work: The rideshare commute
One more byproduct of hybrid work: The rideshare commute
Regardless of how you’re feeling about the results of Tuesday’s election, economic life marches on.
Millions of Americans yesterday and today woke up in the morning, poured themselves some coffee and, if remote work wasn’t an option, embarked on that bleary-eyed commute to the office. Millions of Americans will do the same thing tomorrow.
Turns out, a lot of those commutes now are happening via rideshare. Lyft said this week that nearly half of the company’s weekday rides were commuters. That’s actually a larger share than back in 2019.
The idea of paying for an Uber or Lyft every day to schlep you to and from work sounds prohibitively expensive. But maybe just two or three schleps a week?
“Because people work hybrid, work from home some of the days of the week, that changes the economics,” said Jeremy Michalek, a professor at Carnegie Mellon who studies urban transportation.
Remote work has allowed commuters to reconsider the expense of owning a car versus relying more on rideshare, he said.
Which sounds like great news for carbon emissions. But if you live in San Francisco or New York, you probably weren’t driving into the office anyway.
“Cities that have higher wealth and fewer children are the ones where people seem to shift away from public transit and take an Uber instead,” Michalek said.
Lyft has capitalized on the rideshare commute trend, offering a popular subscription option that caps the price of repeat routes at the same time of day.
Lyft’s Jason Tanz said most rideshare commuters are still generally heading into the office around 9:00 a.m. and home around 5:00 p.m.
But since hybrid work also means days in the office are often more intentionally social — team dinners, happy hours, that type of thing — rideshare gives you options.
“Maybe you want flexibility in the evening so that you can go out and be with your co-workers for a little bit,” Tanz said.
Rideshare drivers hope those happy hours extend later into the night.
Los Angeles Lyft and Uber driver Sergio Avedian, who writes for the website The Rideshare Guy, said serving the 1:00 a.m. exiting-the-bar-crowd is generally more lucrative than commutes.
“Not everybody is willing to take that risk and drive at those hours, so the supply is not there and demand is a lot stronger,” Avedian said. “That’s when surges show up.”
But he said even if the tips are lighter and the traffic is heavier for commuting trips, there are other perks.
“I prefer morning, morning and afternoon rush hours. People are awake,” Avedian said.
And thus, less likely to make a mess in the backseat.
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