It's not, and the rest of this thread dives into it a bunch.

Gas and tire wear implies a ~$2/hour hit, roughly.

Tickets are presumably negligible for long-term drivers? Most people get <1 ticket per year, even with long commutes, and I assume that if you're getting ticketed very often with passengers Uber will drop you as a driver, the cutoff is low for that.

Accidents are hard to call - their 'cost' is basically whatever you pay in insurance (plus some adjustment for future insurance hikes if you file a claim). I don't know how the Uber-insurance thing shook out, so I can't speak to that at all.

The $16/hour wage is now at something like $12/hour (very roughly), but that's neglecting the benefits of having a car (I'm assuming most drivers with Xchange wouldn't have cars if they worked elsewhere, otherwise raise the effective wage by $5/hour).

But of course, that's part-time work. It's voluntarily part-time, but you can't scale up Uber driving arbitrarily - presumably you're already working the highest cash-flow hours and will see decreased hourly wages as you add less-profitable driving time.

So I'll stand by a claim that the money is pretty good, at least in <$10/hour minimum wage markets, but it's locked into a no-benefits, part-time status that prevents it from being an especially good living.

> So I'll stand by a claim that the money is pretty good, at least in <$10/hour minimum wage markets

But the whole calculation of the money was based on the earnings of one driver in LA, which isn't a < $10/hour minimum wage market (California has a $10/hr minimum wage).

(And, after taking the employer-equivalent share of self-employment taxes into account, the pay is barely above the equivalent of a $10/hour employee wage.)

I'd also posit that the majority of Uber drivers do not work in <$10/hour minimum wage markets (NYC, LA, SF, Boston, DC, Portland, Seattle) - or rather, the cost of living that they work in would not allow for that to be a sustainable wage.

I get the sense that Uber drivers are often incentivized to do things that increase their chances of getting a ticket. Then a full time driver spends a lot more time driving than your average person.

I agree that they are. If you're about to miss your exit with a passenger, you might take a risky swerve across a lane to avoid getting a bad rating. Having said that, I still don't think there are lots of Uber drivers racking up tickets, because that gets you fired from your job. So it's a problem for employment, but not a salary factor - by luck or skill, any given Uber driver will still have ~0 tickets.