As an Uber driver, you want to make the most money possible, right? To accomplish that, you need a sound strategy, mapping out optimal times to find passengers. You’ll also want to be assured that those customers will pay what you need to reach your desired hourly earnings rate.
How can you figure out the best times to drive and quickly discover what peak times will work with the rest of your schedule? We get into it in this blog.
Here's what we cover:
Passenger patterns: What are the best times to drive for Uber?
Surely you’ve seen the “heat map” on your Uber app. It shows the areas of town where there is supposedly the most demand for drivers. Sometimes it’s totally on the money, but at other times it doesn’t work so well. One reason might be that there’s a rush of other drivers only too willing to jump in for a chance to score the extra surge prices.
Even when the heat map is at its most torrid, it might not show you the most profitable places to drive. For instance, if there’s a huge concert, game, or festival, there will be a monstrous demand for Uber drivers. Once you race over to the site of the surges, you might also find that you’re stuck in traffic for an hour or two. This will make your trip to pick up Swifties, hockey fans, or denizens of the No Shoes Nation anything but profitable.
It always pays to factor in congestion and delays when you make your driving plans. Keep that in mind when you notice times that seem to be particularly popular with passengers. Uber’s website advises drivers to focus on weekends, rush hours, and evening hours, but these are not the only times you will find peaks in passenger demand. Here are some others.
- The weekday morning commute is always good for catching people on their way to work or caretakers bringing children to school. These will be short rides, by and large, but demand will be high and so will fares.
- Don’t miss out on weekday morning airport runs, particularly if you drive in a large metropolitan area. Business travel is still a thing, and people must be ferried to and from their flights. Hang out around hotels for departing guests and the airports themselves.
- Lunch meetings still happen on weekdays, perhaps for business, or just for fun. Some workers will want to run errands or make personal appointments on lunch breaks, so your availability will be just what the doctor ordered.
- The brunch crowd will be out in force on weekends. Cruise trendy neighborhoods or other areas where omelets, crepes, and pancakes are served up with mimosas, Bloody Mary’s, and piping hot coffee.
- During after-work and after-school commute times, as university classes change over, even short rides can keep you busy with the college crowd if you get enough of them.
- Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights are busy nights in urban areas as passengers set out to celebrate the weekend at restaurants, bars, and events.
Is passenger demand predictable?
While it’s sensible to start putting your strategy together by considering ebbs and flows in passenger activity, you need more information than these general points provide. For one thing, every rush hour isn’t the same, not every airport time-window is equally lucrative, and some events attract more passengers than others.
You’ll also find different patterns depending on where you live. Every area has different traffic patterns, and a variety of events. For instance, you’d definitely want to know the opening and closing hours for museums and other tourist attractions in New York, but in Cleveland or Kansas City, the office and school traffic might make up more of your passenger count than tourist traffic, especially in the winter months.
This brings up another variable in passenger demand: weather, which affects Uber volume in different ways. While there may be less activity when outdoor conditions are too hot, cold, or stormy, demand for your rideshare services will soar because walking is out of the question.
As you can see, you need more information to get a more accurate read of what’s happening in your area and when you can expect the traffic to surge. You need data from drivers who are working in the same areas at the same times you want to work. Fortunately, you can get it very easily from Gridwise!
Use Gridwise and know when to drive
Gridwise is designed for drivers, by drivers. The When to Drive feature gives you insights no other app has to offer. It shows you the volume of earnings drivers experience at various times, based on actual figures! There is no guesswork involved in these numbers. Gridwise anonymously gathers earnings figures from drivers and brings them to you, so you know the best times to drive in your specific area!
Here are the steps to using the When to Drive feature on Gridwise:
- Download the Gridwise app.
- Sign in, tap “Insights,” and then scroll to “When to Drive.” This shows an overview of the big earning days in your area for the current week.
- To get additional data on the best times to drive, tap the bar chart and you’ll see further earnings numbers for different times of the day.
Now you can choose the time frame you want to learn about. Tap in the lower right hand corner where it says “Evenings,” and you’ll arrive at the screen that offers options.
- Select your option (the display will change) and you’ll see the information for the time period you’re most interested in.
- Gridwise When to Drive also provides the ability to compare the best times to drive for all the different services you work for. Tap “Compare Services” on the Insights screen. This takes you to a chart that compares all the services available in your area. You can change the time intervals you want to learn about by clicking on the time shown on the lower right-hand side of the screen.
Note that there are also comments indicating trends in earnings for the services that have experienced gains and losses over the time periods specified.
Gridwise is the very best source for information about the best times to drive. Don’t miss out on this valuable resource! Download the Gridwise App and get When to Drive, along with tons of other features to boost your earnings.
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