A conversation with one of Nelson's few Uber drivers

Sunday, 20 February 2022

Rajendra Deshar is cheerful, friendly and navigates the road adeptly. Everything you'd hope your Uber driver to be.

Rajendra Deshar's Mazda Axela is meticulously clean and smells like pine air freshener.

Deshar is friendly, cheerful, and not at all fazed when he learns his passenger is a reporter with a list of questions.

The ride through the slow after-school traffic is smooth, Deshar driving carefully and considerately. Getting annoyed or beeping at people who cut you off is pointless, he said.

In short, Deshar is a five-star driver, deserving of his perfect rating on the Uber app. He’d like to bring that five-star service to the people of Nelson fulltime, but for that to happen, the ride-share service will need more drivers, attracting in turn more clients, he said.

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“Uber needs to do some heavy marketing for people to know it's in town,” Deshar said.

Uber’s head of Australia and New Zealand communications Peta Fitzgerald declined to say how many drivers were operating in Nelson.

“As a listed company, we don’t comment on metrics such as the ones you’ve requested.”

However, the town had “embraced” the ride-sharing service, Fitzgerald said.

“We first launched Uber in Nelson in August 2019 and have been delighted to see how the local community has embraced Uber as a safe and reliable way to get from A to B.”

“Embraced” might be overstating it; Deshar reckoned there were about six, maybe seven drivers in town.

A couple of those worked fulltime, but most, like Deshar, fit driving around other work.

Deshar estimates he's made around 500 trips since he started driving for Uber just over two months ago. Most of these were short journeys, and the longest was to Motueka, a trip that cost his client around $80.

Most clients hail from out of town, usually larger centres where Uber is well established. A lot of Nelsonians don’t know the ride-share service is in town, he said.

Not surprisingly, the best times to work were Friday and Saturday nights, when Deshar ferries people around town until 3am.

Some spill their drinks on his clean seats even after he’s asked them – politely – to put their drinks away. This means extra cleaning – on top of the extra cleaning he's already doing as a Covid-19 precaution.

But the good outweighs the bad, he said.

“There’s a freedom of work, your own small business. You go online as you like, and offline as you like. If you don't like a trip, you can cancel it.”

Deshar is from Nepal and has lived in Nelson for nearly two years. He came to New Zealand to study business, and lived in Dunedin and Queenstown before landing in Te Tau Ihu.

Nelson has been welcoming, he said. “People are friendly, not like big cities where people are grumpy.

“People will tell me about their travel to, let's say, Abel Tasman, I like to hear their experience, how it went. I’m adventurous, I'd like to go there one day too.”