Before the sun could rise over Los Angeles International Airport on a recent Tuesday, hundreds of Uber and Lyft drivers had formed a queue nearby, stretching around the block. It was 5 a.m., and the waiting game was about to begin.
In a few minutes, the line of cars would file into a fenced-off parking lot, a mile from the arrival terminals. It is known officially as the Transportation Network Company Staging Area, but drivers call it the “pen,” where they wait to be matched with passengers getting off flights.
The spot used to be a prime place to catch rides and earn decent money. But these days, there seem to be few rides to go around. Veronica Hernandez, 50, parked her white Chevy Malibu at 5:26 a.m. and opened the Lyft app to check her place in the queue: 156th. It would be an hour and a half before her first ride of the day.
“You have good days and bad days,” Ms. Hernandez said, swiping through a screen showing her daily earnings on the app that week: $205, $245, $179. “Hopefully it’s a good day.”
Like ride-hailing drivers across the country, Ms. Hernandez has seen her pay decline in recent years, even as the demand for her work feels greater than ever. And with the cost of gas and car insurance rising, the already slim margins of gig work are becoming less workable by the day, she said. No place is more emblematic of these problems than LAX, one of the busiest airports in the world but one of the most difficult places for gig workers to earn a living.
“It used to be a real way to earn money,” Ms. Hernandez said. “Now you can barely survive on it.”
In the early years of app-based platforms like Uber, Lyft and DoorDash, people flocked to sign up as drivers. The idea of making money simply by driving someone around in your own car, on your own schedule, appealed to many, from professional chauffeurs looking for extra work to employees working in the service industry who realized they could break free of the 9-to-5 grind.
The key concept was that drivers would be independent contractors, responsible for their own expenses, without health insurance or other employee benefits but with the flexibility to work whatever hours they wanted, without having to sign up for a shift or have a boss.
And in the early years, wages were high. Drivers would regularly take home thousands of dollars a week, as Uber and Lyft pushed growth over profits, posting quarterly losses in the billions of dollars. Then, when they became public companies, profitability became a focus, and wages gradually shrank.
Now, earnings have fallen behind inflation, and for many drivers have decreased. Last year, Uber drivers made an average of $513 a week in gross earnings, a 3.4 percent decline from the previous year, even as they worked six minutes more a week on average, according to Gridwise, an app that collects data and helps drivers track their earnings. For drivers in Los Angeles, average hourly earnings on Uber are down 21 percent since 2021, Gridwise found.
LAX introduced the new system in 2019, in an effort to cut down on bumper-to-bumper traffic at the arrival terminal. Instead of being picked up by Uber and Lyft drivers at the curb, passengers must walk or take a shuttle from their terminal to a pickup spot called LAX-it, next to Terminal 1, which can take up to 20 minutes. But the driver side of the equation is something passengers rarely see.
That morning, inside the lot, with hundreds of parked cars and the smell of port-a-potties, the mood was grim. Drivers waited for hours to snare rides — “unicorns,” they called them — that would pay them a decent wage of more than $1.50 per mile.
By 10 a.m., the pen had devolved into chaos. While around 300 drivers are waiting in the virtual queue at a given time, the parking lot has only around 200 spots. So, as new cars filed in, they double-parked in front of cars that were already there, which needed to leave the lot to pick up passengers. The result: a cacophony of honking and yelling, drowned out only by the roar of the jet planes overhead, which arrived about every two minutes.
Sergio Avedian, a gig driver and senior contributor to a ride-hailing blog called The Rideshare Guy, settled into the pen on a recent Tuesday morning at 10:36. After finding a parking spot, he opened the queue — 256th in line.
As he watched the Uber and Lyft apps, rides popped up that were rejected by drivers higher in the queue. But the rates were pitiful: $9.87 for a 13-mile trip, $19.97 for a 25-mile trip and so on. He rejected all of them.
“We call this ‘decline and recline,” Mr. Avedian said, lowering his front seat.
To pass the time, groups of drivers smoke cigarettes and play cards. Some nap in their cars or watch YouTube videos. Others wander around hawking phone chargers and car-cleaning products. Occasionally, arguments break out among various groups — sometimes along racial lines — when competition for scarce trips grows fierce.
A separate economy exists in the pen to feed drivers. Outside the parking lot are taco trucks, but inside, some women sell Chinese food from the trunks of their cars, trading plastic bowls of wonton soup for cash.
Some drivers have taken out their frustrations by scribbling curses against Uber and its executives on the walls inside the port-a-potties, lamenting the hourslong rides that result in no tips, or the days they’ve been locked out of their accounts with no explanation.
Sitting in the trunk space of his Toyota Sienna, Andreh Andrias smoked a cigarette as he refreshed his Uber app. Mr. Andrias, a 57-year-old from Iran, said he could make $3,000 a week before expenses driving for Uber before the pandemic, but that has since declined significantly. He flipped through his most recent weekly earnings on his phone: $1,670, $1,700, $1,053.
“You have to take care of the family,” said Mr. Andrias, who has a wife and daughter, and more than $7,000 in car and rent payments to make. “Right now, I cannot.”
The New York Times first asked Uber about the conditions of driving at LAX in 2023, and the company said it was aware of continuing problems. But not much has changed in the years since.
Uber said that a variety of factors were responsible for lower wages, and that its take rate — the percent of each ride’s fare that it keeps for itself — had not increased in Los Angeles. Liability insurance costs, the company said, have skyrocketed, and now account for 43 percent of the rider’s fare.
The company also said a $4 surcharge for ride-hailing drivers at LAX, along with the new pickup system, had significantly lowered the demand for rides at the airport.
LAX’s public relations division did not respond to a request for comment.
C.J. Macklin, a spokesman for Lyft, said the company was working with LAX to develop a new holding lot for ride-hailing drivers, which would be built as part of the airport’s new, $5.5 billion construction project, which includes a light rail between terminals and is supposed to reduce traffic.
“A year from now, LAX will look completely different, and we’re excited for a smoother, faster experience for drivers, riders and the entire city,” Meghan Casserly, an Uber spokeswoman, said in a statement.
In the lot, there was a pervasive sense of sluggishness; the discontent and hours of waiting seemed to lull drivers into inaction, even when a seemingly decent ride chimed on their phones.
“There’s drivers who really don’t know what they’re doing, and they end up at the lot just because they don’t know any better,” said Pablo Gomez, an Uber driver who frequents LAX. “They dropped off a passenger, it said to go to the lot, and they’re like, ‘OK.’ They don’t even know what they’re waiting for.”
Driver advocates like Mr. Avedian and Mr. Gomez try to help drivers strategize and make the most of their time. But Mr. Gomez also empathizes with drivers who keep praying for a windfall. He used to be a compulsive gambler, he said, and driving for Uber feels similar.
“The wasted time is part of that psychology of the addict. You’re just chasing that ride, that score,” he said.
At 2 a.m., when the pen closed, some drivers left to look for a parking spot elsewhere in the neighborhood, where they would sleep in their cars until the lot reopened at 5. Others hoped to catch one final ride in the direction of home, which for many was over an hour away.
Ms. Hernandez was sitting on the hood of her car on Tuesday when it hit 11 p.m., her time to head home. She watched as offers popped up on her phone against the wallpaper of her two children, ages 25 and 26. In between rides, she checked her email, hoping to hear back from jobs she recently applied for at a doctor’s office and a warehouse.
Finally, a ride appeared that would take her near her home in Montebello, a 50-minute drive east. It was only $28 for a 27-mile trip — far from a unicorn — but she accepted.
“It’s not the best rate,” she said. “But you have to make it worth your time.”
