Huang, who drives for Uber and Lyft, once zoomed through San Francisco’s streets, chasing one fare after another. These days, he spends most of his hours behind the wheel at a couple of parking lots designated for ride-hailing companies at San Francisco International Airport. He gets a total of five or six orders a day from the airport, good for about $180. When he factors in his costs, his take drops to just over $100.
Still, Huang considers himself lucky to make that much in what is generally a 12-hour day.
A couple of days with Huang and the other airport denizens shows how the ride-hailing industry — now 14 years old — and San Francisco have changed. Uber and Lyft are no longer startups flush with cash and able to offer drivers attractive and regular bonuses. Nor does San Francisco provide frequent, lucrative rides for scores of tech workers. Gigs downtown, says Huang, “are too small, and drivers may even lose money taking them.”
And so, like thousands of other drivers, Huang now spends more time in the airport lots than anywhere else. (At their request, Mission Local is using only the drivers’ first or last names.)
The drivers vie for one of 180 or so spots in the airport’s ride-hailing parking lots. Once they land a spot, it is a first-in, first-out queue on both the Uber and Lyft apps.
Map by Will Jarrett. Basemap from Mapbox.
A winding path to that $30
To queue up for a ride from the airport, a driver jockeys for one of the increasingly coveted spots inside the two designated lots. Most of the time the guards at the entrance tell drivers to move on — the lots are full.
While a handful of drivers give up, others simply keep circling the area, waiting for a space to clear.
“No matter how many rounds it takes,”says Zhang, a driver in his forties, when asked how long he will circle. Sometimes he makes 10 laps. Each lap, he calculates, takes 20 minutes, stopping and going in traffic, and burning gas.
Once inside, drivers sign on to the apps and the different queues: Uber XL, Uber X, Uber Green, Lyft and others. Uber X generally gets the most orders, drivers say.
Then, they wait for their number to come up. Meanwhile, they check what the Uber app tells them about arriving flights, but they also check FlightAware on arrivals, or even the ETAs of particular flights.
Like country club memberships, the lots have rules
Drivers in the queue must adhere to a series of stringent rules imposed by both the ride-hailing companies and the airport. They can be restricted from accepting airport orders if they fail to display their Uber sticker or airport placard, or don’t leave the lot immediately when they’re told it is full.
Notably, once the drivers get into the lot, they must stay to keep their place in the virtual line on the apps. Exiting for a quick burger at the nearby In-N-Out would send them to the back of the virtual line. Worse, the portable toilets in the lots are “scary and smelly,” says Hongyu, one of the few female drivers.
But still, they stay in the lots and wait for those airport rides that average about $30 a pop. The goal is to wait for a big ride. Uber allows drivers to reject three rides; Lyft allows none. To encourage drivers to take smaller fares, the apps allow drivers who take a ride for $25 or less to regain their spot at the front of the queue once they return.
The waits can be unspeakably long. Earlier this month, Zhang was stuck in the lot from 7 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. turning down rides too small to help meet his mortgage. Then, he snagged an $80 rider with a $20 tip. Victory.
Graphic by Will Jarrett. Recreation of a screenshot of a driver’s phone taken March 9, while they waited for a ride in the SFO parking lot.
Immigrants all
To pass the time, some of the drivers congregate at a spot in the center of one of the lots where someone has placed waist-high ashtrays that overflow with cigarette butts. The piles of butts teeter as drivers smoke and complain about luckless days, worthless rides, or getting a $120 ride to Sacramento, only to have to come back with no passengers.
Most of the drivers are people of color, and many are immigrants. (In San Francisco, people of color make up nearly 80 percent of the on-demand ride-hailing and delivery workforce, according to a 2020 study out of UC Santa Cruz.)
“There’s no other job for me to do,” Huang explains as he moves to position No. 25 in the Uber XL queue. In his 50s, he says, he is too old for a lot of jobs and he can’t speak English. He once worked as a chef, but he likes the freedom and flexibility of driving. “I can take as much time off as I want if my family has an emergency,” he said.
Still, he finds it physically taxing. When he returns home after driving 12 hours on the road, he’s so wiped out that his legs fail him. And, instead of eating the spicy dishes he once cooked, he now gets by with a cold lunchbox.
Zhang said that the hours he has to spend in the car to make ends meet have jumped from eight to 12 or even 14 per day. “If I have to do 16 hours in the future, then I definitely can’t do this anymore,” he said.
An asylum seeker, Zhang hasn’t been able to see his eldest child, who remains in China, for 10 years. “There’s very little left of this child’s feelings for me,” he says. He and his wife have worked hard to make money in the United States, but that’s endangered with the new economics of ride-hailing. His previous car reached the maximum mileage allowed by Lyft after only three years — months before he had paid off his car loan.
Moreover, the economics also aren’t working for Sayed, one of the thousands of Afghan full-time ride-hailing drivers in the Bay Area. By 2 p.m. on a recent Thursday, he hadn’t pocketed a penny and his position in line remained stuck at 91-95. To make things worse, he had to subtract the cost of driving from his home in Fremont. “To be honest, I’m tired. When you are not getting enough money, you are tired,” Sayed said. “A couple of times this year I thought about quitting.”
Like Zhang, Sayed has been considering a career change, but he realizes his options are limited. He injured his right knee during his nine years of military service in Afghanistan, eliminating the possibility of physical labor.
And so Huang, Sayed and the others wait. After all, they are inside the lots. They know that if they leave, one of the many cars lined up outside of the lots will gladly slide into their place. “There are at least 40 or 50 cars lined up outside now,” says Uber XL driver Lehua on a recent Friday afternoon.
That line, drivers say, often reaches all the way to Highway 101. At night, they say, the headlights of those in line nearly outshine the lights coming from SFO.
