I spent two weeks delivering for Uber Eats and made $4.40 per hour

Sounds like a raw deal for a bicycle, but, how about on a scooter?

The main issue is that they don't have enough customers but they still pull out as many people as they can to work for almost free

Sounds like the Foodora people have their act together so if a scooter was a winning strategy they would be doing that. Maybe city driving regulations are a problem? A bike with an electric boost could be good though.

Sad, they should be paying them well, Uber is such a mess

I see your point. In Sweden, I see they don't have a minimum wage, and that they use collective bargaining to make agreements. Since Uber Eats is new, I imagine they haven't established a union yet.

I wonder how that will play out.

Yeah, but e-bikes have very limited range which would quickly become an issue on longer runs. The systems are awfully heavy to pedal unassisted; well at least my Bionx conversion was (have removed it since).

If you join a union you'll get kicked out is how that will work I imagine.

In cities that are not entirely built around cars (i.e. most European cities) you are much faster on a bicycle, esp. when you know the area.

Last but not least, esp in dense traffic: With a good bike you can accelerate much faster than you can economically on a scooter.

In this case the guy drove 25 km/shift for Uber Eats and 37 km/shift for Foodora.

My ebike with a Bosch drive unit and a 400 Wh battery gets me a range of about 35-40 km on the maximum assist mode ("Turbo").

Also, the batteries are easily swappable. Just place some chargers with extra batteries in a few of the restaurants...

If you deliver with a scooter you get a little more for every delivery and can access more delivery zones, but you pay for gas.

Or at least a podcast about how you are better off as an "entrepreneur" without unions. https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/14/14912524/uber-driver-app-...

Electric bike might help you go faster, though. And charging those is cheap.

(But the extra speed might not matter in start-stop traffic of cities.)

I wonder if that would be legal by Swedish law. Probably not.

Firing someone for joining a union is against the law. In fact firing an employee after a grace period is difficult in Scandinavia unless they are clearly incompetent or criminal.

For that reason it might even be that Uber doesn't worry too much about high turnover because it means that most of their workers are sackable without having to give reasons or compensation.

Remember that Uber insists their employees are not employees.

I would note that both are highly dangerous in a city, another factor not being compensated for.

In Sweden, as in most of the EU, electric bicycles are required by law to reduce the assistance as the speed increases and to cut out entirely above 25 km/h. So an electric bike wouldn't be much help to a courier, who would mostly be going faster than 25 km/h. (A faster vehicle would come under the moped regulations and the rider would need a license and insurance.)

They work around that by calling these employees 'freelancers'. Which is of course bullshit since there's a top-down relationship, but these employees don't have the means (resources/info/money) to combat this in a court of law.

The trick abused before was hiring people as interim, and then sacking them right before they had to be hired permanently by law. I know first hand even the government in The Netherlands did this in '00. However this still means these people need to get minimum wage (actually, more, since the employment agency also demands a cut). As you can see, the freelance trick is more lucrative.

The Bosch system is crank driven, right? In hind sight I regret not going for something like that. The Bionx hub is ludicrously heavy, with short spokes prone to breakage, and required (at the time) its own crappy cassette.

I had to crack the 25 km/h speed limit restriction as going above it required an almost Herculean effort. It should have reverted to an assistance level that offset the weight / drag, but alas.. it just turned off.

Batteries were easy enough to replace though.

Yeah, it's placed in the crank house.

What I like the most about this is the sensor system. I am pretty sure there is an actual torque sensor in there. This makes for a very smooth acceleration phase.

Along with a back wheel magnet sensor to keep the speed limit. Last year I made a homemade hack for this.. I used a microcontroller, an electromagnet and a magnetic sensor from a cheapo bike computer to forget every second impulse towards the Bosch system. It worked. The speed limit changed to 50 km/h.

Ended up not bothering to weather-proof it though. 25 km/h is enough most of the time anyway.

True, they would only really help with faster acceleration at low speed then. But I guess the extra weight ain't worth it.