RideAustin #SXSW Weekend 1 Rideshare Recap (and yes — we’re still true to our open data pledge even while getting beat up in the press)…
By Andy Tryba & Marisa Goldenberg
Ah the joys of the spotlight… With 70k visitors and all eyes on Austin this week for SXSW — we at RideAustin certainly received some sharp (and legitimate) criticism on the hours on Saturday where we weren’t at our best. We take full responsibility and will use it to continue to learn and grow as a company.
But what was missed in almost all of the stories was our commitment to transparency and honesty. And as a part of our open-data pledge (which is unique in the rideshare industry) — we wanted to take the opportunity to share data regarding the first weekend of SXSW.
RideAustin volume hit an all-time record of 70,000 completed rides last week. The SXSW days averaged 50–100% increases week-on-week. We continue to be #1 in the Austin market.
RideAustin hit a new watermark of 70,000 completed rides for the week. 5 out of the 7 days were all record days (Wed-Sun). This record weekly volume is despite us leaving ~5k rides unfilled during our intermittent service on Sat between 7:30–11:30pm.
In a short 270 days since we launched — we’ve now completed over 1.2M rides. Our first 100k rides took 94 days, our latest 100k took 10 days.
Cumulative — the Austin rideshare companies will do 25–40% more volume than when Uber & Lyft were here last year. RideAustin alone is averaging over 15k rides/day at this point in SXSW and expected to grow to 25k/day as we approach weekend 2. RideAustin volume is ~2X what Lyft was doing when they were here.
Though Uber & Lyft are almost always secretive about their rideshare data — based on what Uber published in 2015 — we believe they did a combined 350k rides last SXSW (Uber at 250k and Lyft at 100k). RideAustin will do between 175–200k alone (2x Lyft) and we are ~40% share. This implies a total market of 437k to 500k. The market for Austin rideshare continues to grow dramatically and that demand (less the hiccup) is being filled. Agreed that rideshare sucked during those few hours — but contrary to the perception given by the various news articles — the city is moving around in record rideshare volumes never before seen in Austin.
On a typical week, 60% of our rides are completed on the weekend (Friday — Sunday) — but for SXSW — this has increased to 66%. In the chart below — you can see the demand for rideshare varies greatly by time of day — with the fewest rides coming in between 3 a.m. and 7 a.m. and the highest number of rides coming between 6pm and midnight on Fridays and Saturdays.
This past weekend, our Sunday volumes were more than double a typical Sunday. The pink bars below reflect that increased Sunday volume (though you’ll note zero trips at 2am on Sun — the daylight savings time jump).
You’ll also see our diminished Saturday volumes between 7:30pm and 11:30pm — due to the intermittent tech issues we encountered. We believe we left around ~5k rides unfilled.
Trip fares averaged $16.12 for the week — $15.53 during the week and $16.42 during the weekend.
Trip fares can vary significantly by day and hour but averaged $16.12 for the week. This was significantly more expensive than our average last week of $14.86. The most expensive average day for RideAustin was Saturday ($18.24) and the least expensive average day was Tues ($15.42). Overall, the weekend rates tend to be a bit higher than weekdays. This weekend was a bit higher than normal due to the increased need to use ‘Priority fare’ (our version of surge pricing) to encourage more drivers to get online during SXSW.
Weekend late night windows (2–4am) are the most expensive times to get a ride, since there are always fewer drivers on the road. Transporting drunk passengers comes with risks (we also have a sizable number of cleaning fees charged on weekends due to passengers with a bit too much to drink)… Given the high volume of requests at bar exits, Priority Fare pricing brings more drivers out.
RideAustin averaged 5.6 min pickup times across the city and across all hours.
RideAustin’s pick-up times average 5.0 minutes in a typical week, with downtown areas having shorter times, and the outlying suburbs longer times. This past week, we averaged 5.6 minute pick-up times — about 36 seconds longer than usual. We believe this was due to the increased traffic and road closures — making pickup times a bit longer.
The pick-up times also vary by time of day, with early morning (3–6am) and morning (6–9am) incurring the longest waits. In the early morning hours, this is usually due to fewer drivers on the road, and in the morning rush hour we see more trips originating from the outer areas of the city. Our 6–9am window pick-ups were higher than normal, due to increased trip requests from early morning SXSW attendees and airport runs.
Evening and late night hours have the shortest pick up times, because the requests are generally concentrated to downtown Austin and the University of Texas campus. Both areas draw a lot of drivers in these hours, due to the predictable nature of the incoming requests.
RideAustin paid nearly $1M in driver earnings during the week. During the first 3 days of SXSW, we averaged 2,350 total drivers per day.
During the week, we usually have between 250–350 concurrent drivers on the road at any given time during the day. This has been sufficient to easily cover the typical weekday demand and enable 4–5 minute average pickup times.
In preparation for SXSW, we ramped up our driver onboarding and signed on hundreds of additional drivers. For large event in Austin — we typically have drivers that come from various cities around Texas to drive for RideAustin since they can make more money than driving for Uber or Lyft in their own city. As a result, we’ve averaged 569 concurrent drivers over the SXSW days — peaking at 1336 drivers on Saturday night.
On average — our drivers made $12.22/hr during the week and $20.90/hr on the weekend. The best hour to drive was Sunday at 3–4am where drivers made $49.54/hr. We paid out nearly $1M in driver earnings for the week! Our top driver made over $2700 last week, 89 drivers made over $1000, 644 drivers made over $500 and 2744 did at least 1 trip. Average earnings last week was $344.12 with a median of $266.32.
We have ~30% of drivers that drive for only RideAustin (we love them) — but we know that the other 70% drive for multiple rideshares throughout the night. We believe this ‘70/30’ split is also consistent with other rideshare companies — meaning there are a few hundred Austin drivers that use another rideshare platform as primary and RideAustin as secondary. These folks only move to their ‘backup’ rideshare as a last resort — when their preferred app goes down for a substantial amount of time. We’ve seen this quick influx of drivers in previous times when competitor apps experienced issues or went completely down during ACL Festival, Halloween weekend and New Year’s Eve. We saw it again this past Saturday when we suddenly increased our driver count by 25% within 2 mins. Unfortunately, we didn’t handle it well this time and it took us a few hours to get back to full service. Lots of articles have been published about this hiccup — so we’ll leave this topic for those…
Extra stat: SXSW visitors are better tippers than the normal Austin crowd. We saw an increase of 11% of riders that tipped vs pre-SXSW.
Unlike Uber — RideAustin offers in-app tipping of your driver. On any typical week or weekend — we’ll have around 38% of riders tip their drivers (average tip is $2.42). Ironically — for SXSW — we noticed a statistically significant increase in the tips this past weekend where 49% of riders tipped. Maybe people were happy to be at SXSW — but as a local Austinite — not sure what that says… But one conclusion could be that the SXSW visitors are better tippers than we are :)…
Not surprisingly, the late night crowd has a lower tip rate — but they tend to pay higher fares with our surge pricing which is usually in effect at that time.
Thank you SXSW visitors for your generosity — the RideAustin drivers appreciate it!
Well, we’ve learned how bright the spotlight can be when we’re not running smooth… But overall — it’s been a great SXSW so far and we’ll continue to work hard to deliver the best service we can.
And we’ll continue to stay true to our ‘open-data pledge’ and hopefully (someday) we can make this the norm in the rideshare industry…
