Right now,uber doesn't really care about minimizing a drivers idle time,but they'd need to otherwise. Prop 22 would still pay drivers a floor of 120% * minimum wage while they're actually driving in exchange for unpaid idle time,that 20% is a lower bound for how much they'll need to reduce the pool of drivers.
As a response, Uber/Lyft will need to either start assigning shifts or add a limit to the # of drivers that can be clocked in. I know they punish drivers that skip a ton of consecutive passengers, but they'll need to take into account the fact that a driver at 3am probably only needs to skip one or two passengers to get paid for the full hour.
I’ve already had drivers accept my ride and then just sit waiting or drive around aimlessly waiting for me to cancel so I’ll be charged for it.
I suspect this will be more common if giving rides is not directly tied to making money.
I generally think it’s a bad idea though. I’d like to think I could be persuaded otherwise, but the arguments I heard in favor of AB5 or no on 22 didn’t seem that strong.
The sense I got from friends voting no was it was mostly driven by anti-Uber motivated reasoning without much thought about existing incentives and unexpected negative consequences.
The sense I took away from reading about AB5 was that it’s a push to get drivers marked as employees so the teamsters could unionize them and collect fees.
Basically a political battle behind the scenes is the real fight and this other stuff is just confusing the issue.
In that context Yes on 22 seemed like a good option.
I can see how it might raise the price of worse rides but why would it cause more no-shows/cancelling?