Drivers of online car-hailing driven by points, a changed taste of shared travel
Editor’s note: This article is from the WeChat public account “IT Times” (ID: vittimes) , author: Sun Pengfei.
(1) In September this year, Didi revised its driver’s reputation evaluation criteria in Shanghai. Drivers need to complete approximately 180 to 200 peak orders per month. Complete the mission and start a life driven by points.
(2) Whether it is Didi or Meituan, whether a good order can be dispatched, everything is measured by points. Even in rainy days when it is difficult to get a taxi, some drivers I couldn’t receive the order because he was badly reviewed.
In the App, they are just a blue or yellow dot, flashing on the roads of the magic city, driving slowly or flowing quickly. Until you arrive in front of you, you can see their real existence-an online ride-hailing driver.
More than a month ago, Wang Ning (pseudonym) became a full-time Meituan driver. Go out at 7 o’clock every day and go home at 12 o’clock in the evening. The only 7 hours left in the day is his rest time.
This cycle of work is not easy. When you stay in a small space for four hours, a sense of suffocation develops. Although the scenery along the way is changing, and every day you will encounter all kinds of passengers, but these may not have much to do with them. Driving requires concentration. Exhaustion mixed with sleepiness is the state of Wang Ning after he goes offline every day.
Wang Ning’s sleep is not very good recently. When the “IT Times” reporter saw At his time, I have thick dark circles under my eyes. He put on sunglasses.
Why are you so desperate? Many online ride-hailing drivers give different answers: there is the temptation to not miss the peak subsidy, and there are also compromises to the pressure of life.
In September this year, Didi revised its driver’s reputation evaluation criteria in Shanghai. Drivers need to complete about 180 to 200 peak orders each month to complete the task. If you do not get a full score, it means that the number of orders sent by the platform in the second month will drop sharply.
Didi revised the evaluation criteria of driver’s word-of-mouth value image source/network
At the same time, Didi will increase the points for the morning peak (7:00-9:59) from 0.4 points/order to 0.45 points/order, and for the evening peak (17:00-18:59) and midnight events ( 22:00-22:59) Points dropped from 0.4 points/order to 0.35 points/order, which is intended to allow drivers to take more morning peak orders.
This is a life controlled by the system, and the struggling ride-hailing drivers become silent. It seems that they have lost their freedom under the banner of “sharing economy”. But this seems to be an inevitable result. Under strong supervision, “shared travel” loses its original meaning. With more full-time drivers, higher KPIs, and more urgent capital demands, everything seems to be tangled and contradictory. solution.
01Exhausted:Must earn more than 10,000 points per month Driven by the speed of life
Before joining the industry, Wang Ning bought a Japanese car with a loan of more than 200,000 yuan and registered for an online car-hailing license. His flying life begins.
Wang Ning goes out at 7 o’clock every morning and does not miss the reward opportunity of Meituan morning peak. The platform reward of about 100 yuan in the morning and evening peak hours is Wang Ning’s motivation. And working until midnight is because Meituan will increase late-night taxi fares, which means higher turnover.
Wang Ning’s daily turnover is about 800 yuan, and last month it is open all month, and the turnover is close to 25,000 yuan. He calculated an account for the “IT Times” reporter, deducting about 6,000 yuan a month for gas and 3,000 yuan for meals, and got about 15,000 yuan.
With a monthly income of 15,000 yuan, Wang Ning bluntly said that he was tired and had to run thirty or forty orders a day. Sometimes he encountered traffic jams in the morning peak, and it took nearly half an hour to drive only 1 km away from the destination.
That was the moment he was trembling. Some passengers turn their grievances about being lateAs a result of marrying the driver, Wang Ning received a bad review and his service score was lowered.
When he entered the industry, Wang Ning’s initial service score was 60 points, with a maximum score of 130 points. If you get 130 points, it means that more Meituan high-quality singles can be sent to him first. “Some long-distance orders can be charged more than 100 yuan. I rarely receive such high-quality orders.”
At present, Wang Ning’s service score is more than 70 points, which can increase by 20 points every month. He expects to reach full marks in three or four months. But this is not easy. He needs to go online every day to compete for rewards during the morning and evening peaks.
Wang Ning also considered giving up, and occasionally wanted to rest two days a week. But as the main source of the family’s economy, coupled with the pressure of the car loan, he has to stop all social interactions, “Let’s wait for the car loan to be paid off.”
From another perspective, even after paying off the car loan and reaching the peak of the service points, Wang Ning may still be unable to relax. Driven by scores, he may still need to continue running under scores and system deployment.
Didi driver Wang Ke (pseudonym) also knows this.
In September this year, Didi updated its system, upgraded the original points system from 100 points to 130 points, and adjusted the points rules for each time period. Only with a good score of 130 points, the system will give priority to the order.
Wang Ke is still adapting to the new system. When he is not good at words, he will brazenly ask for praise when serving passengers.
If the passenger gives the default praise, Wang Ke’s good score can be increased by 0.2 points, if multiplied by Guest host Dynamic evaluation, he will receive an extra 0.3 points. But in most cases, passengers will only default to praise.
Picture source/network
Wang Ke had to accept multiple ordersWay to improve the score. “Now I am not as comfortable as before. I have to run 2 hours a day to get the same flow as before.” Wang Ke reflects that after the new system is online, in order to score well, he is more willing to take short-distance orders because of the long-distance orders. Time-consuming, of course, service points increase more slowly in the same time.
Another change is that because the morning peak score is higher, he originally started working at noon and chose to get up early to score. The other side of profitability is their schedule and rest dominated by the system and platform.
02Helpless:Everything is measured by points, rainy day drivers Unable to receive the order
The Didi driver group that Wang Ke joined is constantly changing. Farewell and influx are constant topics in the group.
Some people miss the time when online car-hailing emerged, and the reward is 500-800 yuan a day. Many drivers rush around and spend the night in the car in order to make more money. Now The old driver lamented that the income is no more than in the past, and the unit volume needs to be increased.
An online ride-hailing driver said with emotion that nowadays the platform pays more attention to consumers who make money on the platform.
Online car-hailing under the banner of shared travel behavior originally played the role of matching and facilitating transactions between users and drivers. Whether it is a user who pays for travel or a driver who is commissioned, both are sources of income for the platform.
According to Chai Chen, associate professor of the School of Transportation Engineering of Tongji University, drivers are also “customers” that the online ride-hailing platform should serve well.
The reality is that the basic full-time drivers have lost the freedom to start work, and gradually strengthened supervision, so that the online car-hailing platform is no longer a simple matching trading platform. The management of drivers is the responsibility of the platform. .
Nowadays, only high service scores can receive high-quality orders. This is the strong management of the platform, but it has raised the requirements for the ability of drivers in a disguised form. At the same time, it has also made “shared capacity” less pure.
In extreme weather, Modu is not easy to take a taxi. During a rainstorm, users go toI have to wait for nearly half an hour. On the other hand, there are still free online ride-hailing cars running in the streets of Magic City waiting for orders.
One rainy day, Wang Ke did not receive an order. Because he was “bad review”. Due to the drop-off point requested by the passenger, the online car-hailing cannot stop. Although the passenger has agreed to walk a few tens of meters, the other party still changed hands after getting off the bus and gave a low score.
Some bad reviews could have been avoided. Many online ride-hailing drivers reported that due to the discrepancy between the pick-up address automatically identified by the Didi and Meituan systems, they need to call to communicate with users. System deviation, the driver’s delay in finding the user, the bad experience caused by it, ended with a bad review.
There are also drivers who say that the route arranged by the system is unreasonable, even though a certain road is under construction, and they also exchange routes with passengers. But the user changed hands with a bad review.
What made Didi driver Lin Hao (pseudonym) feel “stuck” is that the drop-off point recommended by the system was near a Shanghai bus station. He hit a traffic police on duty. He received a 200 yuan ticket and was deducted 3 Points for driving.
He got a 200 yuan red envelope after reporting to Didi, but the deduction has become an established fact. Lin Hao said that for similar reasons, his driver’s license has been deducted 9 points this year. Lin Hao now rarely picks up orders with destinations near airports, railway stations, subway stations and bus stops, in order to avoid traffic police.
03 User:From point to portrait, the driver remains the same Silence
In order to run more time, rest time is Wang Ning’s meal time. Wang Ke chose to get out of the car, slowly.
“The setting of the Didi system is that the billing time of the day will not be received after 10 hours.” Although Wang Ke believes that the system has a certain effect on preventing fatigue driving, as an old driver, he thinks I still have the energy to take more orders and want to make more money.
DiDi Anti-Fatigue Driving Rules Picture Source/Network
This is the confrontation between human nature and the system, but behind it is the regulatory pressure that online car-hailing as a special service closely related to safety must face.
Safety and anti-fatigue are the key points required by regulators on the platform.
outConsidering that fatigue driving may lead to travel safety, the Didi and Meituan systems currently require drivers to take a 20-minute break after serving up to 4 hours. In addition, Meituan will use education and training methods and daily safety information pushes in driver safety classes to remind drivers not to drive fatigued.
Meituan told the IT Times reporter that the service score is a comprehensive reflection of the overall service quality of the driver, and has nothing to do with the length of service. The driver can freely choose the departure time and the number of orders according to his own situation.
Didi responded to the IT Times stating that Didi uses AI technology to build a fatigue driving early warning system, which is installed in safe on-board intelligent hardware (orange vision equipment) to analyze and identify the fatigue status of drivers in real time. Before the driver enters a state of fatigue, the voice reminds the driver to pay attention to ventilation and rest in time to avoid fatigue driving. When a driver is identified as a fatigue feature twice in a row, he will be forced to go offline.
In 2019, Didi broadcasted 304 million times of fatigue driving reminders through car owners and intelligent hardware orange vision, and more than 3 million drivers received special education on fatigue driving.
Picture source/network
The ride-hailing driver in the App is just a “point” in the platform. For travel safety considerations, the platform’s mandatory offline system guarantees the driving state to a certain extent, but the factors affecting travel safety such as the driver’s psychological state and working status during the travel process are often ignored by the platform. The image of each driver in the system is just the accumulation of service points and orders.
Chai Chen once designed a system for analyzing high-risk driver identification for an online car-hailing platform. By studying the GPS trajectories of 723 online car-hailing drivers for 12,000 journeys, the introduction of The speed under the same road, Acceleration, acceleration rate of change and other factors to judge the driver’s driving and mental state, and find out drivers with higher driving risks.
But in the face of tens of millions of online car-hailing drivers, the investment in the popularization of big data-like portraits and recognition systems is undoubtedly huge. Where is the driving force of the platform? Didi has accumulated losses of 50 billion.
When the car was approaching the destination, an online ride-hailing driver asked reporters about nearby restaurants. After running all morning, he felt hungry. When the car stopped, the driver smoked a cigarette. Smoky, it was more than 2 pm.
Reporter’s Notes: The Lost Shared “Original”
The emergence of online car-hailing has alleviated the difficulty of getting a taxi in the taxi market and the unreasonable allocation of resources, bringing convenience for users to travel, and making the world have no difficult taxis. This is the origin of the emergence of many ride-hailing platforms such as Didi and Meituan in the industry.
According to the data of the Prospective Industry Research Institute, in 2019, the number of online car-hailing users in my country reached 400 million, the utilization rate was 47.3%, and the market size reached 304.41 billion yuan.
Picture Source/Qianzhan Industry Research Institute
Unfortunately, the nature of online car-hailing has changed.
If the emergence of shared travel is to mobilize travel demand and the allocation of resources between vacant vehicles, online ride-hailing drivers can gain freedom in working hours.
The reality is that drivers are exhausted under the point system.
From a supervisory point of view, everything may be a sign.
In July 2016, seven ministries and commissions including the Ministry of Transport, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and the Ministry of Public Security jointly promulgated the “Interim Measures for the Management of Online Taxi Booking Operation and Service”, requiring that the three certificates of people, vehicles and platforms for the legal and compliant operation of online car-hailing One.
Three months later, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and other cities successively issued the “Draft for Solicitation of Local Rules for Online Car-hailing”. The requirements for vehicle wheelbase, battery life, household registration and residence permit have blocked some part-time online car-hailing drivers. At the door.
In September 2018, the General Office of the Ministry of Transport and the General Office of the Ministry of Public Security jointly issued the “Emergency Notice on Further Strengthening the Safety Management of Online Booking of Taxi and Private Car Sharing”, requesting that the nationwide Organize and carry out special rectification actions against illegally engaged in taxi operations, comprehensively remove unqualified vehicles and drivers, and basically To achieve compliance with online car-hailing platform companies, vehicles and drivers.
Therefore, the platform has shifted from a C2C model that was asset-light but unable to implement effective regulatory constraints on the supply side to a B2C model that is similar to taxi management. Nowadays, if you want to become an online car-hailing driver in Shanghai, driving a car or coming from a car rental company, or being affiliated with a car rental company, it is not allowed to do part-time jobs with personal free capacity.
Many online car-hailing drivers reported to the IT Times reporter that if an online car-hailing company that is not affiliated with a car rental company is caught by traffic police, the driver will face the reality of being detained and fined.
Online ride-hailing drivers and taxi drivers have the same goal.
The “IT Times” reporter tried to find an effective solution, but could not find the answer. A compliant platform, a silent driver, and a point-materialized system have become an unavoidable fate in this world.
Introduction to the main creator
Author/IT Times reporter Sun Pengfei
Edit/Kicked Girl
Typesetting/Feng Chengjie