By Dan Frosch
Jonathan Meyers sat in his Prius on a Wednesday morning and had about three seconds to make a decision on every Lyft and Uber fare that flashed across his phone before another driver snapped it up.
He could make $7.02 for a 1.2-mile trip. But the drive to pick up his fare would take around seven minutes.
There was also a drive across town for $23.15. The money was better, but he would be on the road for an hour.
And there was a 13.2-mile, 53-minute ride to LAX for $35.59. He took it.
These days, Meyers's daily calculus on whether to take a fare includes the rising cost of gasoline -- which in Los Angeles can run upward of $6 a gallon.
Gig drivers, food-delivery workers and independent drivers are being hit especially hard at the pump and making split-second calculations and adjustments to their lives and livelihoods.
"It changes the way I've been selecting rides," said Meyers, a 61-year-old writer who earns between $1,000 and $1,500 driving up to 60 hours a week for Uber and Lyft. He has stopped taking rides that require him to drive "superlong distances." He has taken on extra hours driving to make up for what he estimates is a 25% drop in earnings from rides he now turns down, trading off longer drives for shorter ones to save gas.
"It's about conserving gas and also trying to make sure I end up in a neighborhood where I can gas up for a sane price," he said.
Some drivers are turning down longer fares that aren't worth the gas cost. Others are driving longer hours or sticking to areas where gas prices are cheaper. A few said they are thinking about occupations altogether.
Joe Davis, an 81-year-old former Uber driver, now runs his own car service in Santa Fe, N.M. He charges $80 to take people to or from the Albuquerque airport, between 60 and 80 miles away, depending on where he is. Most of his rides are repeat customers -- retirees, tourists, actors working on productions in northern New Mexico. Sometimes, he will drive elderly people from their homes in the subdivisions outside Santa Fe to doctors appointments and grocery stores for a minimum of $30.
Until recently, Davis calculated that he made about $50 for each one-way trip to the airport, when figuring in gas. A retiree himself, Davis mostly lives off his Social Security, so the extra money is important, he said.
With higher gas prices, he is clearing about $15 to 20 less a ride, Davis said, and he has needed to take on more customers to make the airport drive profitable. He recently sidelined his prized 2001 BMW X5 in favor of a 2014 Hyundai Tucson he bought from his niece because he says it gets about 8 miles better gas mileage.
"I hate that car," he quipped. "But that's what I have to use now."
Davis has cut out extras at home -- he canceled Netflix, Paramount and other streaming channels, and now doesn't go out to eat more than once a week. He has begrudgingly considering cutting out the rides into town for elderly customers. He is also thinking about raising his airport fare to $100, which he guesses his wealthier actor clients can handle. He wants to avoid raising the fares on some of his customers, especially the older ones, as long as possible.
"I'm trying to wait it out," he said.
The average cost of regular gas in Santa Fe has risen from about $2.90 a gallon a year ago to just over $4, according to AAA, the roadside assistance company.
Erika Martinez, an Uber and Lyft driver in the San Francisco Bay Area, used to fill up her 2022 Toyota RAV4 every morning for about $50, before spending the day shuttling customers across the region. Sometimes, she would take people as far as Santa Cruz, about 75 miles south.
These days, Martinez prefers to top off her tank long before it is empty, not wanting to spend the $80 a full tank costs all at once. She won't take fares farther than Petaluma, about 40 miles away from San Francisco, and turns down several requests for rides a day. Those longer rides are no longer worth the gas money, she said.
"The gas keeps going up and up. If it keeps going up, I won't be able to keep driving," she said. Martinez, 52, currently logs about 50 hours a week to make ends meet.
The AI-driven algorithm that Uber uses to set fares has already been resulting in lower per-ride pay for drivers, according to drivers and ride-hailing associations. Rising gas prices have made profit margins tighter.
Martinez said her weekly take-home earnings of $1,200 began going down a year ago because of lower fares and have continued to drop to $700 because of high gas prices. If gas stays high, Martinez said, she might have to consider a different way to make money. She used to do the accounting for an Italian bakery and is thinking about going back to that, she said.
Uber Technologies and Lyft began last month offering discounts for drivers to help offset gas prices, including expanded savings and rewards when using Uber and Lyft debit cards.
An Uber spokesman said its number of drivers has remained stable over the past few months.
The spokesman said the majority of fares typically go to drivers, but the exact percentage varies and depends on a range of factors determined by an algorithm, including distance, location and traffic. In some places drivers might see reduced earnings because of increased local fees, taxes and insurance costs that the company must pay, the Uber spokesman said.
A Lyft spokeswoman referred to comments from a company executive, Jeremy Bird, on driver pay from a November podcast.
"We're genuinely trying to balance keeping rides affordable enough that demand stays strong, while making sure the people doing the work are compensated fairly," Bird said.
The number of people collecting income from ride-hailing or delivery-gig driving climbed from fewer than 300,000 in 2014 to five million in 2023, according to a study by several economists. Most do other work as well, said Andrew Garin, a Carnegie Mellon University economist who worked on the study.
For Meyers, driving Uber or Lyft is his primary source of income -- and material for a one-man play he wrote and performs, and hopes to turn into a television pilot. The play is about a gig driver's adventures transporting people across Los Angeles during the first years of ride-hailing and how it connected people from disparate corners of the city.
Meyers has been transitioning to mobile notary work because of the declining revenue from fares. Stress from the jump in gas prices has solidified his decision, he said.
"This is a meaningful job, especially in this particular city because we're all so incredibly isolated," he said. "But I'm looking to move on."
Write to Dan Frosch at dan.frosch@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 11, 2026 20:00 ET (00:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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