Catch a Ride

Jerry Meyerson loves the adventure of driving for Uber and meeting new people with interesting stories every night. Note the yellow vehicle-inspection sticker on his car windshield, an easy way for passengers to know that Uber drivers are licensed by the city. (Photo: ©2015 Arthur Meyerson)

Chris Beverly doesn’t drive when he goes out in the evening. The 36-year-old medical administrator doesn’t want to drink and drive. Plus it’s a hassle. “You pay to valet; that’s $10 plus tip. Then, you have to mess with the valet. When I left a party recently, there was a guy, still standing in line, who had left the party 45 minutes earlier. As my Uber car pulled up, I told him, ‘Dude, you need to start Ubering.’”

Andrew White, entrepreneur and father of three, started using Uber, a phone app that allows you to request a car ride, to go out to dinner. Then he took it to the airport. “It’s cheaper than parking,” he said. “I find myself thinking of new applications for it, like – is this terrible? – having our housekeeper, who doesn’t drive, take an Uber to bring our kids to baseball practice.” (Uber does require children under 18 to be accompanied by an adult.)

Another Uber customer, realizing she wasn’t going to be on time to take her 86-year-old mother to a beauty-salon appointment, ordered her an Uber. Then when a friend expressed concern about safety, she raced over and secretly followed the car driving her mother. All was well.

“My 19-year-old nephew was at the Free Press Summer Fest this summer with friends,” said Georgia Stewart, an educational diagnostician. “He called his mom to pick them up. ‘No,’ she said, ‘take an Uber.’”

There are many vehicle-for-hire companies in Houston. Super Shuttle gets you to the airport. I Have A Driver, scheduled to launch this year, will provide a uniformed driver to drive your own car. Yellow Cab has its own app, Hail A Cab. Lone Star Cab Company uses a national app for cabs called Curb. Unlike Uber, Curb can be used to order a car in advance. (Lyft, an Uber-like service, is no longer in Houston.)

An often-touted selling point of Uber is that it will provide a ride within minutes. During busy times, such as after the bars close on Washington Avenue or a Texans game lets out, however, Uber’s algorithms will institute surge pricing, charging a higher fare. The app will show you how much more and can be set to notify you when surge pricing in your area stops.

According to Business Insider, a standard Uber ride costs about 35 percent less than a taxi in Houston. “Uber isn’t competing with cabs,” said one Uber driver. “Uber competes with those times when you would be asking your friends for a ride.” Incidentally, I was in this driver’s car because I had found out minutes earlier that my mechanic wouldn’t have my car ready and I needed to pick my child up at school.

The charge for the ride is automatically processed through the phone app. While tipping isn’t necessary, drivers say they are not averse to receiving them. “I’ll tip if I ask the driver to do something extra, like pick up a friend on the way or go through a Jack In the Box drive-through for me on the way home,” said Beverly.

The company started in 2009 and is now in 54 countries. To start, you download the Uber smartphone app and input your credit-card information. The app uses your phone’s GPS to determine your pick-up location. You will see a pin drop on the map on your phone, marking where you are. (Veteran drivers advise, when the app marks your pick-up location, to double-check it for accuracy.)

 A nearby Uber driver will accept your trip and you will get an estimated time of arrival, with an estimate of your fare. Your ride is automatically charged to your credit card; no cash changes hands. You cannot call for a ride; you must use the app (for insurance reasons). And you cannot make arrangements ahead of time; you call when you are ready to go.

The Uber driver is an independent contractor, driving his or her own car. Jerry Meyerson, a Bellaire resident bursting with energy, drives in the evenings after work, but not for the money, he says. “It’s the most fun I’ve ever had. You never know who your next guest will be or where they are going,” says Meyerson, who credits the job with helping him recover from the recent losses of his son Alexander and wife Roxanne. In the first four months he drove, he transported pole dancers and economists, professional athletes and Pakistani tourists.

Another driver who lives in a Buzz neighborhood works full-time in IT and drives Uber 20 to 30 hours a week to make some extra money. “My weekly goal is to bill $500,” he said.

In a current Yelp-era twist, customers are asked to rate their drivers. If a driver’s average rating falls below 4½ out of 5 stars, he or she can be booted from Uber. But the drivers also rate you. And customers who behaved badly enough have been booted, at least temporarily, from the app.

“I didn’t know [about the customer ratings] till a driver showed me,” said Beverly. “I got five stars. Woohoo.”

Recent controversy about Uber

Uber, which was founded in 2009, has expanded rapidly. According to its website, its services are currently available in 57 countries and “hundreds” of cities. But its arrival in a city is often marked by controversy, lawsuits, pro-Uber petitions and a scramble by officials to figure out how to regulate it and companies like it, such as Lyft and Sidecar. (Uber is the only “transportation network company” (TNC) currently operating in Houston.)

Uber’s arrival here was no different. When it and Lyft first arrived, the Houston City Council embarked on a year-long study to come up with a definition of and rules for TNCs. Its regulations, which went into force in November of 2014, require drivers for TNCs to pass all the same requirements as other professional drivers in the city, which include a criminal background check done by the city, using fingerprints checked against an FBI database. Lyft decided to leave Houston because of these regulations.

On April 1, an Uber driver was arrested for allegedly sexually assaulting a passenger in Houston. The driver had passed Uber’s own background checks, which check for criminal history based on the person’s social-security number, and was allowed to use the app but had never applied for the required city license. If he had, the city says, its criminal background check would have found his criminal record and his application would have been turned down.

According to Lara Cottingham, deputy assistant director of the city’s regulatory affairs department, the city has issued roughly 800 citations to Uber drivers for lacking this license in 2015 alone. On April 14, Mayor Annise Parker, who had told the Houston Chronicle that she was “‘beside myself right now at being angry at Uber,’” sent a letter telling the company it had four days to present her with its plan to “to ensure all drivers operating within the city limits of Houston have been licensed,” or its own permit, allowing it to operate in the city, would be “subject to revocation.”

The company reportedly did comply with a detailed explanation of its efforts and how it will increase them. For instance, according to the company’s letter, written by Chris Nakutis, Uber’s general manager, the company’s process for checking that drivers working in Houston are licensed has been increased from multiple checks per week to daily checks. Nakutis said that Uber immediately revokes a driver’s access to its app if it finds the driver has accepted ride requests in Houston without having the city license. The mayor, in her response to the company’s letter, said, “I am pleased to see that Uber appears to have taken affirmative steps to end their willful noncompliance and look forward to a report confirming these efforts from my regulatory staff.”

Meanwhile, state legislators in Austin are considering a bill that would create statewide regulations for TNCs. The original bill would have stripped cities of the ability to impose their own regulations. However, according to the San Antonio Express-News, the bill’s sponsor, Republican Rep. Chris Paddie of Marshall, said he will change the bill to allow cities to require fingerprint-based criminal background checks.

One quick way to know if your Houston Uber driver is licensed by the city, according to Cottingham, is to look for a yellow vehicle-inspection sticker on the right side of the car’s windshield. You can also ask to see the driver’s city license.