Always Tip Your Driver

Trip length: 56 minutes. Trip distance: 4.8 miles. Fare: $21.37 (Surge: 1.6x) Year: 2015 Song of the trip: “Forever” by The Charlatans UK I pull the car up in front of La Victoria Taqueria on San Carlos St. between 3 rd and 4 th . It's right off the San Jose State University campus, and a short distance walk from the strip of bars over on 1 st St, and it's open until 3 a.m. most nights. The name on my phone says Taylor so I don't know if it's a guy or a girl I'm picking up. Kids these days. Better than the tech bros, I guess. There's actually enough space for me to pull in front of La Vics and wait, so I bring the car up against the curve and turn the blinkers on. Most of the time, Lac Vics pickups are college students who need a lift home, and they're short drives, so you can get a number of them in quick turnaround during surge pricing. But sometimes you gotta wait. The timer is on. 2:18 a.m. Five minutes until they're offici...

Trip length: 8 (or 14) minutes. Trip distance: 1.4 miles. Fare: $9.02. Year: 2017 Song of the trip:  “Dad I'm In Jail” by Was (Not Was) Sometimes I make the wrong call on whether or not to pick up a fare. Every time I show up to a location, I have to make a snap judgment - is this safe, or is this going to be the kind of fare that gets me into serious trouble? 99% of the time, it's a very easy call to make. Some people going out for dinner in nice clothes, some people in clothes that used to be nice coming home from the bar late, people going to or from a concert, people with bags full of groceries to take home, people going to or from the airport... It's almost second nature that they're just people and the situation isn't going to be dicey. And then there's the 1%. It's a well-known fact I hate 1%. One percenters, 1% odds of failure, you name it... just the number and the symbol are enough to give me the jitters. So I suppose I truly should...

Trip length: 38 minutes. Trip distance: 27  miles. Fare: $48.90. (split/UberPool) Year: 2018.  Song of the trip:  “Battle Without Honor Or Humanity” by Tomoyasu Hotei Being in San Francisco around bar close is, I imagine, a lot what the evacuation of a war zone is like. Everyone is scrambling to find their way out of town, many people are nervous and aimless, and there's a general sense of impending disaster on every face you see. As a rule, I try to avoid driving in San Francisco for any length of time, but tonight a chain of events had ended up in me dropping off a guy at 1:45 a.m. at his home in downtown SF, and short of just turning the app off and heading home, there was no chance I was getting out of here without a fare. This conundrum was that any fare I was going to get was going to pay well, but it was also going to be high risk. See, the city of San Francisco swells during work days and on the weekends, but empties out because no one can actually...