A National Rideshare Cooperative Takes Aim at Uber and Lyft
After years of getting squeezed by Uber and Lyft, a national rideshare cooperative is offering drivers equity stakes that Silicon Valley refuses to grant.
The Drivers Cooperative guarantees drivers 80 percent of each ride’s fare, retaining the remaining 20 percent for administrative and overhead expenses. (DuKai Photographer / Moment via Getty Images)
After seven years of driving for Uber, Phred Riggs had enough.
Riggs said the company deactivated his account five times over the last five years for no reason. He also didn’t like how Uber would sometimes stack rides together, which sometimes made him take up to four different rides simultaneously. It started to feel like his 2016 Ford Fusion was turning into a bus, he said.
Then his earnings began to drop even though he accepted the same number of rides. For instance, he used to earn $35 for a roughly twenty-three-mile one-way trip from Downtown Denver to Denver International Airport. When Riggs quit, he was earning $19 for the same trip. It was unlike anything he had seen in his more than four-decade career as a driver.
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