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Part-Time Ride-Sharing: Recognizing the Context in which Drivers Ride-Share and its Impact on Platform Use

Published: 05 December 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Ride-sharing companies have been reshaping the structure and practice of ride-hailing work. At the same time, studies have been showing mixed driver experiences on the platform while many of the drivers are working part-time. In this research, we seek to understand why drivers on this platform are working part-time, how this impacts their view of the platform, and what this means for more accurately evaluating the design of these platforms. To investigate this question, we focused on situating ride-sharing in the lives and constellation of gigs that drivers maintain. We collected 53 survey responses and conducted 10 semi-structured interviews with drivers to probe these questions. We found that the extent that drivers categorize themselves as part-time is less about the number of hours worked and more about how dependent they are on ride-sharing income. The level of this dependency seemed to heavily influence how they interacted with the platform and their attitudes towards difficulties faced. It seemed to us that in some ways that the design or functioning of the platform almost pushed users towards working part-time. We discuss the importance of taking these different types of workers and their situations into consideration when evaluating the design and usability of these platforms.

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cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction  Volume 3, Issue GROUP
GROUP
December 2019
425 pages
EISSN:2573-0142
DOI:10.1145/3375021
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 05 December 2019
Published in PACMHCI Volume 3, Issue GROUP

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Author Tags

  1. driver
  2. gig work
  3. ride-sharing
  4. sharing economy
  5. uber

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