UberX Intercity is back in the spotlight after a job shared by DriverMatty showed a fare working out to less than 85p a mile, prompting a wave of driver frustration on social media.
The trip, posted as a short video clip, showed an Intercity job of £35.06 for a 41.7-mile run from Hamilton Square in Birkenhead over to Manchester, close to the airport. Do the maths and that comes to roughly 84p per mile, a rate that a lot of private hire drivers would consider barely worth the diesel, let alone the wear and tear of an hour-plus motorway trip.
Intercity is Uber’s option for longer, city-to-city journeys, allowing drivers to opt in for trips that take them well outside their usual patch. Uber has pitched it as a way for drivers to pick up fewer, longer jobs instead of a string of short hops, with the promise of being prioritised for a return trip back towards their home city to help offset dead mileage.
In theory, that’s an appealing pitch. In practice, the fare shown in this clip suggests the reality doesn’t always match up. The video simply posed the question to drivers: would you do this job? Judging by the reaction, the answer from a fair few was a firm no, with drivers who saw the clip saying they wouldn’t take on Intercity work at anywhere near that rate.
It’s not hard to see why. A near-42-mile trip out to Manchester means the best part of an hour and a half on the road once you factor in the return leg, much of it on the motorway, for a return that many drivers would expect on a job half that distance. For an owner-driver covering fuel, insurance, and vehicle wear out of every fare, 84p a mile on a long-distance job is a tough sell compared to the per-mile rates typically seen on shorter, local bookings.
This isn’t the first time Intercity pricing has raised eyebrows among UK drivers since the feature began appearing in driver apps. The wider concern has always been the same: longer trips look attractive on paper, but only if the per-mile rate actually reflects the extra time, fuel and dead mileage involved. Jobs like this one suggest that, for some routes at least, the numbers still aren’t stacking up in drivers’ favour.
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