#lyft support

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Driver PSA: Watch your ride totals! 

As I dropped off a Line with two passengers From DC to Arlington, I noticed the brief flash on the screen that it was a 100% primetime trip. This made me momentarily smile and then quickly shake my head in disbelief because earnings for the ride was below eight dollars. Any minimum ride would be four dollars and 100% primetime would automatically make that at least eight dollars, so I made a mental note (and a screenshot) to raise the issue with support later after I finished driving. 

Props to Lyft support for acknowledging the mistake made by the system... although the Lyft driver dashboard reporting STILL does NOT have itemized accounting when an adjustment is made. That’s a serious fail since the only way to check back that a promised adjustment was made is to manually add up all bonuses, one ride at a time.

Either way, watch your ride totals out there folks! The system may completely miss paying you correctly and if you don’t catch it, they may not either!

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Whether it’s no-show fees (either under special circumstances or when the system fails to correctly add them) or the occasional toll not automatically being credited or any other small adjustment promised by Lyft support, this message fails in at least one major way.

There’s no line item to indicate the adjustment!

The “bonuses” section is not itemized. The only way for a driver to verify that such an adjustment was actually added would be to open and add up every single ride that included a bonus for the week. If the total is higher than all the bonuses earned from rides, one would presume that something was added. If the higher amount happened to equal the promised pay adjustment, then the driver could be fairly certain that higher amount was the adjustment promised by support.

Ideal? Certainly Not!

Of course, going through all the rides and adding them up to check is entirely too cumbersome and would take a lot of time, so most drivers would never do it. I’ve noted this important issue to support a few times. It may or may not be on their list of things to do, but the issue persists. How hard can it be to add a line item? Lyft used to show an “other” line item for certain bonuses paid to Ambassador/Recruiters. Maybe someone removed that field along with those opportunities.

Can we go ahead and say, “less is NOT more” here?

Missing something this obvious for driver reporting and accounting is irksome and ridiculous. https://twitter.com/shawnblog/status/922534372871409664

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Higher chance of rides?

Starting with the usual copy/paste help center responses and finally leading to half answers after responding to multiple Lyft “support” reps on the topic, it looks like the flags that are meant to signify a higher chance of rides while in driver mode on Lyft app are based on driver location, not the passenger pickup location as many have likely assumed. 

This makes sense for a lot of reasons, but is also very clear that if the flag is positioned directly on a highway onramp—we’ve all gotten the dreaded onramp request a few times—that was the DRIVER location, not the passenger pickup request location! Aside from this obvious evidence, Lyft is certainly not about to publish request locations. Not only would that be a privacy violation, but also a competitive intelligence breach.

So if you’re anywhere near one of these higher chance of rides flags, you’re good. Don’t drive right to where the flag is. The flag only signifies historic data of general driver locations where requests were accepted. Nothing more.

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Dispute a bad rating!

Remember that the rating system was designed both ways to keep things fair so don't be afraid to note down what you thought about them. If you think something went wrong on a trip, “cop to it” if it was, in fact, “on you” and take the hit on your rating. Lesson learned, move on. Done.

But if you have one of “those” passengers who exhibits immediate rudeness or is, in some other way, clearly already having a bad day when they get in your car... the sage old Polish proverb, not my circus not my monkeys comes to mind.

Of course, there will be times when even after everything you've done, they're still faulting you for something out of your control. In that scenario, if you feel a passenger may rate you poorly due to not breaking Lyft Line or other rules just for them or something else outside your control, give all the details in the comment box after that ride. Then copy your comments before submitting the rating and use that same text as the basis for a support ticket to ask for that rating to be omitted from your average,

With your comments already in place on the app and this ticket to spark immediate action from support, they can go back to your ride history and see your side of the story to can take action if warranted.