Uber to start charging passengers if they don’t arrive within two minutes

The app has announced a range of changes intended on helping Uber drivers enjoy their work more

One of the self-driving Uber cars being tested in Pittsburgh (Uber)

Uber passengers need to get to their car within two minutes or face charges.

The company has rolled out new rules that will see Uber drivers start their virtual meters after two minutes of waiting. Previously, passengers had five minutes to get to their car.

The announcement comes alongside a range of other changes that are intended to make drivers’ jobs better and easier. Those include special ways of letting people find journeys that will take them nearer to their house, and a way of pausing requests for new journeys so that they can take a break.

Uber said that it had made the move to “make driving more empowering and worth your while”. The company insists that its drivers are their own boss and aren’t employees, and so keeping them on-board is important.

Part of that is the new limit on how long people have to get out to and find their Uber, the company wrote in a blog post.

“Your time is valuable, so it’s frustrating when riders run late or cancel when you’re already at the pickup location,” Uber writes in its blog post. “We’ve been trying something new: paying drivers for wait times that exceed two minutes. In the cities where we’ve been testing this, we’ve seen that riders are more likely to be prompt.

“We’ll be expanding the policy to a dozen US cities this month, with more coming soon.”

As well as the new limit, the site offered new changes to the way that Uber drivers fulfil their journey requests. Those include “Driver Destinations”, where drivers can say that they want to go to a certain place – such as home or their work – and the app will find other passengers who want to head that way.

In addition, drivers will now have the ability to pause requests so they aren’t inundated, new locations with real staff so that people can have in-person meetings and ride discounts for Uber drivers who want to be a passenger.