timelets

It's no accident that Uber took off during one of the worst recessions in American history.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/02/mit-study-shows-how-much-driving-for-uber-or-lyft-sucks/

The researchers found profit from ride-hail driving to be “very low”. On an hourly basis, the median profit was $3.37 per hour, with 74% of drivers earning less than the minimum wage in the state where they operate.

They also found a median driver generates $0.59 per mile of driving but incurs costs of $0.30 per mile; and almost a third (30 per cent) of drivers were found to incur expenses exceeding their revenue or to be losing money for every mile they drive.

Ultimately, the service needs commodity drivers: either cheap labor or robots ( e.g. the GPS technology commoditized cabbies' knowledge of street maps, especially, in big cities.