It seems immoral, if not downright illegal, for Lyft/Citibike to retroactively change their payment schedule in the middle of a month, with no notification, after we’ve already done the work, and already redeemed our points, based on getting paid by the end of the following month, not the month after!
Lyft is a huge company, and they obviously don’t understand – or more likely just don’t care- that we freelancers actually have bills to pay and cannot just put off creditors. Since I did not get the payment in November as I was supposed to, now I’m going to be charged a service fee by my bank because I did not have that deposit, Credit cards and other bills now will probably have to be paid late, which could result in getting charged additional fines, all due to Lyft refusing to pay us within the 30 day time frame that they told us they would. And for Lyft to decide out of the blue that instead of making us wait more than the 3 weeks it has been since the summer (which was bad enough, after being paid within 7 to 10 days until that point), we now have to wait 60 days, shows how little respect they have for the Citibike Angel program and what we do.
Without the bike angels, they would a big problem balancing the system, filling stations that need bikes, and reducing the number at stations that have too many. What is the point of helping move bikes starting in the beginning of December 2024, when potentially I won’t see my awards or money until the end of February 2025?
Also, in these new terms, which Lyft/Citibike still has not actually sent to anybody, they have changed many of the rules to make earning points much more onerous, but also vague and one sided.
According to the new terms, they say the following:
“Such opportunities often change on a minute-by-minute basis and therefore any given point-earning opportunity may be available only for a very limited amount of time.” So does this mean that points at stations will change in smaller intervals than 15 minutes? Smaller than 5 minutes?
“You will be eligible to earn the points displayed in the mobile application at the moment you begin a given ride, subject to Lyft’s review and approval in its sole discretion.”
“Lyft reserves the right to withhold or deduct points or rewards in the event that Lyft determines or believes that the receipt or redemption of the points was in error, fraudulent, illegal, a result of unintended exploitation of the algorithm, or in violation of these Terms. Lyft may cap your ability to earn or redeem points within a certain period of time and/or the total amount of points you may have in your account at a given time.
So is Lyft going to start deciding which rides are “point earning” and which ones are not AFTER we complete a ride? Or a few months later when denying payments? Or arbitrarily at some point decide that we’ve earned enough points for the hour/day/month? How are they going to make this decision? What mechanism do we have to appeal? And what do they mean by “…a result of unintended exploitation of the algorithm”?
We need further clarification as to what these changes mean, and how they may be applied to us. I understand that Lyft wants to cut down on cheating, which makes sense, but it seems like all these changes add up to making bike angels feel like they are suspect, and any or all benefits they might get from the program could be reduced or terminated without any explanation, at any time. I really wonder how many people are going to want to be like angels if this is how Lyft/Citibike is going to be treating us going forward.
