Lyft Series: Dashboard, Hours and Prime Time Tips
- Lyft Registration
- Lyft Mentor Ride
- Lyft Dashboard and Hours and Prime Time Tips
- Lyft Daily and Weekly Summaries and Payment
- Lyft Facebook Lounge and Groupme Chat
There are a few things here in the dashboard. The one critical thing missing is the summaries of all your lyfts. These come to your email daily and weekly (discussed in the next post), but it would be nice to instantly see your lyfts including donations, tips, date and time of your lyfts.
The major items in the dashboard are the hours page. This is where you can request certain hours to work. The only reason why you would do this is because sometimes Lyft prevents too many people from coming online at once, thus reducing the average hourly salary of the drivers online. This is to guarantee that you can work during those hours. If you have a set schedule and would like to work during certain hours, you can reserve those hours. You can see that some hours are already greyed out, which means enough drivers have already reserved those hours ahead of time.
The top portion of the calendar is to pick up any available hours for this upcoming week. The bottom calendar is to put in your request for hours next week. So far in Boston, I didn’t have to reserve hours the week before in order to work on certain hours. As more drivers sign on to drive for Lyft, I may need to start reserving hours, like Friday/Saturday nights.
The calendar now shows average hourly salaries you can expect to earn based on their data. These are just estimates and can vary for the hours you work. It will also depend on where you driving in Boston. Remember that there are no more minimum hourly salaries anymore. I do not believe that these hourly salaries take into account Prime Time Tips.
The other major thing is the FAQ that is in the driver dashboard. It is listed on the menu on the left. This covers many questions that I had. It also shows you the criteria for getting a 1099 form (MISC if you earned over $600 with new city bonus or –K if you had over $20k in fares and over 200 Lyfts). It is pretty well done.
Hours
The dashboard has the calendar of hours and has expected earnings. If you look at the highest estimated amounts, you can get a sense of when to work.
I would say it’s very busy between 7-9am (9am-10am may be busy as well, but not very consistently) and between 5-9pm during the weekday, Friday 10pm-3am, Saturdays 5-3am, and most of the day Sunday. These were my observations and it can vary a lot depending on where you are in Boston.
Keep in mind that Lyft clients (at least in Boston) are mostly college students or recent college graduates so they will have the most requests from college campuses. Earlier in the week, I spent about 90 minutes just driving around BU campus. I don’t think I’ve ever drove through the same area so much as I did that night, which is good as it kept me busy with requests and ETA’s low.
Prime Time Tips
The only way you can find out if PTT is active is through the client app. In driver mode, there is no way to tell, which kind of sucks. Other drivers have noticed the observer effect, which is that when you are on the client app, you may be pinging the system with demand, so it will trigger PTT. When you get back into driver mode, it may go away. But I believe that if you see PTT on the client app, it means drivers may get PTT.
PTT may be in effect and go away in a few moments. PTT is very fluid so that it can help entice drivers to drive and also compensate the few drivers on the road accordingly. It is also better for the clients as less clients may have to pay extra for their rides. However, at this time there is no advanced notice for PTT and it usually doesn’t stay on for long periods of time. I believe that in order to entice more drivers on the road, it should stay on longer and have adequate notification so that we have a chance to sign on. Right now, we are all hunting on the client app to check and then start driving.
I haven’t drove on a Friday/Saturday night with PTT in effect but on a Thursday night, I had PTT for about half of my rides between 6-10pm. Not too bad.
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