“The American dream is calling: Won’t you pick up?”
Drive: Scraping by in Uber’s America, One Ride at a Time by Jonathan Rigsby (Beacon Press, 2024)
Reviewed by Kimberly A. Bain
In this eye-opening account, Jonathan Rigsby details his escapades working in the gig economy as a rideshare driver and the ways in which joining Uber and Lyft in Tallahassee, Florida, was a harrowing experience. Rigsby’s story focuses on the personal encounters with riders and the circumstances that brought him to this opportunity to earn money. Rigsby offers an honest look at one man’s experience as he faces the challenges of keeping his life on track as a recent divorcee and single father while his life intersects with those of his riders, interspersed with fast facts and figures about the rideshare industry.
Opting to join the rideshare gig industry was not necessarily optional for Rigsby. He needed to supplement his income as a counterterrorism analyst, so he opted for the only solution he found to co-parenting his child. He begins the first chapter by stating, “My decision to become a rideshare was driven by necessity, not desire” (6). One might expect only a narrative of zany encounters to sit back and chuckle at, but Drive provides an authentic look at the opportunities and the failures of driving with companies such as Uber. Rigsby shares details of personal encounters with his clients in graphic detail, recounting honest-to-a-fault conversations with half-drunken college students and sobering accounts of violent attacks and client hostility.
Throughout Drive, Rigsby’s vulnerability in recounting his experiences and his mental and emotional state through them can connect the audience to the human experience from every perspective. Loneliness is a consistent theme in Drive as Rigsby finds solace in the connections he shares with his clients. Living in an unfamiliar town with few close family members to rely on for support, Rigsby finds himself not only identifying with his clients, but coping with his circumstances through these interactions, pointing out that “My passengers became my therapy” (139). Particular interactions often give him context for understanding more universal concepts of life. Noting one client that he picks up from court who has been convicted of drug trafficking, he points out that “Even in the dreamy McMansion-filled suburbs, it only took a few mistakes for your actions to ripple outward and upend the lives of the people around you” (113). Rigsby considers the universality of suffering that exists for all involved in the rideshare experience. It’s as if Rigsby hopes to enlighten his readers on the fragility of human experience and remove the binary of winners and losers from that experience.
Through the fast-paced interactions and encounters Rigsby has with his clients, he shows the ways in which life shifts and changes instantly, as though moving from one destination to the other. Rigsby’s life as a single father and a rideshare driver point to the reality that, despite all efforts, life can change at the click of a rideshare acceptance button, and that the universality of suffering is often more realized while living at the margins of financial and personal stability. Rigsby offers a view into the personal and professional considerations of rideshare driving that provide context for readers to identify with from whatever seat of the car they find themselves in.
Drive brilliantly brings home the idea that people are connected by the margins that allow each other to see the shared fragility of human experience. Rigsby doesn’t shy away from providing an authentic account of his poverty and his mental, physical, and emotional precariousness, because these are what connect him to both his clients and readers. The ways in which connections are made come at the click of a rideshare app and are lost just as quickly. As clients stride in and out of Rigsby’s vehicle, these momentary and fragile instances of connection point to larger meanings for Rigsby’s life, whether in seeing the value others place in making false connections, as expressed to him in his client interactions, or in identifying ways to maintain the meaningful connection that he attempts to hold to both with himself and his son.
Finding meaning beyond simply surviving as a rideshare driver and cash-strapped father is the lens through which he details his experiences and proves to be the fuel by which he drives himself emotionally, physically, and mentally. Holding on to the meaning he finds in supporting himself and his son under the guise of capitalistic optimism is contested with when Rigsby witnesses a severe car accident that involved another Uber driver. After detailing what he witnesses, Rigsby writes, “We pushed ourselves to the breaking point and beyond, hoping that we would make it home, rather than be the ones that ended up against the tree in a mound of broken glass and shattered plastic” (146). Rigsby’s circumstances center around fragility, and what comes out of his experiences does not necessarily equate to a “success” story. Ultimately, there is no happy ending in Drive for rideshare contractors. Rather, what readers are left with is a culmination of experiences shared by one driver who demonstrates what all the detailed experiences of living on the margins of financial and personal stability can do to a person with his back against the wall. While chapter ten leaves Rigsby with a job promotion in his counterterrorism analyst position (his first job), he points out that “Years of grinding away at two jobs took its toll on [his] mental and physical health…” (155).
Drive confronts some of the American mythos. The idea that hard work affords endless opportunity for financial stability is challenged in this book. At the close of this book, Rigsby surmises that “Every one of us has had to make ugly sacrifices when the money wasn’t there” (158). Rigsby forces readers to understand that exploitation and oppression are a real aspect of the opportunities afforded in a free market society. In identifying the struggles that these rideshare companies have with their own financial instability, including Uber’s inability to maintain stable financial profits despite its advertising to the contrary, one can see the consequences of maintaining an economy on the backs of the exploited.
Drive doesn’t shy away from addressing the questionable business practices of rideshare companies and the contentious relationships these companies have with their drivers as they seek to eat away at their drivers’ profit margins. Interjecting sobering facts about rideshare companies’ business practices, Rigsby removes the veil of capitalist optimism that one might experience heading opportunistically into the rideshare gig industry. For example, Rigsby outlines companies’ practices of lobbying against workers’ rights under California Proposition 22 and encouraging rider practices, like shoddy payment systems, that put drivers in danger. To provide context for his critical analysis of these rideshare companies, he poignantly states, “It’s the American Dream calling from your pocket. Won’t you pick up?” The American Dream might be calling through rideshare opportunities, but Rigsby’s sobering account of the questionable business practices of large rideshare companies might make you reluctant to pick up.
Yet readers of Drive will not find any call-to-action prompting them to rally for workers’ rights. Readers will not find a heartfelt plea at the end of this book urging them to reconsider signing up as a driver and click “Go” as they ominously drive off into the distance. Readers will not even get a hint of a signal to delete a rideshare app. Rather, what readers will find is the opportunity to embrace the fragility of life through the lens of one man who strove so hard against a tenuous existence. Knowing that his experiences are not unique and that drivers around the world share similar, possibly even more harrowing experiences than his, one can identify the ways in which empathy can be shared with those whose experiences are only a download, click, and drive away from their own.
Kimberly Bain is an assistant professor of English at Palm Beach Atlantic University. Her favorite genres to read are self-help nonfiction and Southern Gothic fiction.
