Comet
A short trip can pay well or barely at all, and the pickup usually decides which. Here is how to check one in seconds, with one short ride worked through with two different pickups.
A short trip is worth it when the pickup is short too and traffic is moving, so the payout still clears your hourly minimum over pickup plus trip time. A long pickup or a crawl in front of a short ride is what turns a good fare into a poor one.
A short trip isn’t good or bad on its own. What matters is everything the fare has to pay for: the drive to the rider, the ride itself and the minutes both take. On a 2-mile ride, the pickup can be half the job.
Why the pickup weighs more on a short trip
Your time on a job starts when you accept, not when the rider gets in, so the fare has to cover the pickup too. On a long trip the pickup is a small slice of that. Put a 3.4-mile pickup ahead of a 15-mile trip and it’s under a fifth of the miles. Put the same pickup ahead of a 2.1-mile trip and it’s more than half.
So on a short trip, don’t judge the fare against the trip alone. Judge it against pickup and trip together.
Comet runs the first two on every offer. The third tells you why the first two move: the bigger the pickup share, the harder the fare has to work. On short trips it climbs fast.
One short trip, two pickups
Take an example Uber offer: $7.10 for a 2.1-mile, 8-minute trip with a 4.92 rider.
With a 0.6-mile pickup that takes 3 minutes, you’re engaged for 2.7 miles and 11 minutes. That’s $7.10 ÷ 11 × 60 = $38.73 an hour and $7.10 ÷ 2.7 = $2.63 a mile. The pickup is 3 of the 11 minutes. Comet grades it Highly profitable — accept, green, with $6.77 left after $0.33 to drive it.
Now put a 3.4-mile, 10-minute pickup in front of the very same trip.
Engaged time is now 5.5 miles and 18 minutes, and the pickup is 10 of those 18 minutes. The rate drops to $23.67 an hour and $1.29 a mile. The pickup counts against the offer, the per-mile rate is under the $1.50 line and the hourly rate sits in the borderline range. Comet calls it Borderline — your call, amber, with $6.43 left after $0.67 to drive it.
Same fare, same rider, same ride. Seven more minutes of unpaid driving took $15.06 off the hourly rate. For more on that trade, see Is a long pickup worth it?
When traffic sinks a short trip
Short trips can fail on the clock even with a short pickup. A 2-mile ride that crawls looks great per mile and pays badly per hour, because per mile ignores time.
Say an offer pays $6.20 for a 1.0-mile pickup and a 1.8-mile trip with a 4.88 rider. If the pickup takes 4 minutes and the trip 14, that’s 18 minutes: $20.67 an hour and $2.21 a mile. Comet grades it Highly profitable — accept, green, though the hourly rate is only in the borderline range.
Stretch it to a 6-minute pickup and a 20-minute trip, 26 minutes in all, and the hourly rate falls to $14.31 an hour, under the $18 line. The per-mile rate doesn’t move at all: still $2.21. Comet drops the offer to Borderline — your call, amber. Read the minutes on the offer card, not just the miles, and believe what you can see out the windshield.
Tiny payouts deserve a look too. An example offer pays $4.60 for a 1.2-mile, 4-minute pickup and a 1.5-mile, 6-minute trip with a 4.90 rider. The payout under $5 counts against it, but over 10 engaged minutes it still works out to $27.60 an hour and $1.70 a mile, and Comet grades it Highly profitable — accept, green, with $4.27 left after $0.33 to drive it. The rate is fine. The catch is that a $4.60 trip only keeps that rate if the next offer comes quickly. Say you then wait 15 minutes for the next one: $4.60 ÷ 25 × 60 = $11.04 an hour across those 25 minutes.
When a short trip is worth taking
A short trip is worth it when the whole job, pickup included, clears your minimums. In practice that tends to mean:
- The pickup is short next to the trip. If the drive to the rider is longer than the ride, check the hourly rate twice.
- Traffic is moving. A short trip’s per-mile rate can hide a poor hourly one. Time is where short trips lose.
- The drop-off is somewhere busy. A short ride that leaves you near the next rider keeps your hour full. One that leaves you somewhere quiet adds an unpaid drive back that the offer’s numbers don’t include.
- It still pays after costs. Small fares leave little room. Know your own cost per mile so you know what a few dollars really leaves you.
Pass, or think hard, when a short trip comes with a long pickup, a jammed route or a drop-off far from where the work is.
Comet’s lines here are defaults: $25 an hour and $1.50 a mile for green, a pickup up to 3 miles as good, and payouts under $5 counted against an offer. You can change each one in the app to match your car, your market and the hour you want.
Comet reads each offer card and grades it, pickup included, against your own minimums. Green, amber or red shows before you tap. You still make the call.
