Around 3 a.m. on Friday morning, Jeremy Alaynick pulled into the parking lot at the Palm Springs International Airport. He parked his Chevrolet pickup truck and leaned the driver’s seat back to get a few hours of sleep.

The 38-year-old had come to the airport parking lot as a rest stop on a three-day business trip. It was the opening weekend of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival and Alaynick, a part-time Uber driver, had journeyed 140 miles from San Diego in the hopes that the music festival would prove lucrative.

To break even on the weekend, Alaynick needed to gross at least $300 to pay for accommodations, plus however much he spent on gas and food. There was no guarantee that he would.

The Desert Sun followed a group of drivers as they navigated the Coachella Valley’s largest event of the year, where they hoped to piggyback on the success of the popular music festival, even if it meant braving crowded parking lots, minding inebriated passengers and napping in their cars.

More than 100,000 people attended the first weekend of the Indio music festival, a feat that might not be possible without the temporary influx of buses, limousines, vans, Ubers and Lyfts.

On the road

In the days before the music festival starts, rideshare drivers obsessively trade intel, passing around maps of pickup locations and debating whether the weekend of work will be worth the effort. Uber and Lyft, meanwhile, goad drivers to head to Indio, too, sending them tip sheets and offering financial bonuses if they work during Coachella.

A few drivers declined to be quoted in this story, fearful that Uber or Lyft would deactivate their accounts if they did. An Uber spokesperson said the company “will not deactivate or bring other penalties against a driver partner for simply speaking with reporters about their experience driving for Uber,” but does investigate drivers who violate company policy, like admitting to breaking the law while using Uber. A Lyft spokesperson said the media is welcome to interview drivers.

Drivers who did agree to be quoted came from as far away as San Diego, like Alaynick, or as near as Palm Springs. Many said they enjoy working behind the wheel, a job that allows them to meet interesting people, set their own hours and visit new locales where they might not otherwise venture.

But they said both Uber and Lyft have tinkered with their pay structure, and drivers believe the new formulas can make it less profitable to work. Drivers described earning more money in the past when Uber paid them a multiple of their usual rate during busy times. Today, they said, the company pays them a flat dollar amount added to their fare during busy periods instead. Drivers see it as an effective pay cut for longer rides.

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On top of the usual pay structure, both companies use temporary perks as incentives for drivers to work during Coachella. Uber gave drivers an extra $40 for every ride they made out of a designated Uber parking lot at the festival. Lyft advertised higher rates, a $25 bonus for drivers who did five or more daytime rides and a guarantee that drivers would earn $50 for each late-night pickup in a zone around the music venue. But given the traffic around the festival, some drivers decided they would make more money if they avoided time-consuming rides into and out of the grounds.

Johnny Chung, the host of the King of Uber podcast, recommended that drivers who don't already live in the Coachella Valley stay at home during the music festival.

"For a driver to drive out to Coachella and do all those dead miles, it is not worth it, because they still have to drive back all those dead miles," said Chung, who has driven for Uber for five years in Orange County.

By the end of the weekend, Alaynick said he would probably drive for Uber at home in San Diego rather than go to the Coachella Valley during next year’s festival — if he’s still driving for Uber at all.

“Who knows what the rate cuts will be by that time?” he said. “I may not even be doing this anymore because it may not even be profitable.”

For many drivers, the graveyard shift is the busiest part of a music festival weekend, as concertgoers leave the Empire Polo Club after the last performances of the evening, then fan across the Coachella Valley in search of parties, grub and a place to crash.

In the lull before the late-night rush, drivers used the downtime on Saturday afternoon to rest and refuel for the long night ahead.

Jenny Hedstrom spent part of the afternoon reclining on a pink rug and a bunch of comforters in the backseat of her SUV, with the windows rolled down and a box of Marlboro Red 100 cigarettes beside her head.

She had gone to a Planet Fitness gym in La Quinta to take a shower, then returned to her car, where she listened to a meditation on Apple Music. As 5 p.m. approached, she started to doze.

Hedstrom, who started driving with Uber in 2016 and has been living in her car since August, considers the app her main job. During a good weekend in Los Angeles, she estimates she can earn $300 to $600 over the course of three days.

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On Thursday, the 30-year-old had driven down to the Coachella Valley from Santa Monica to play guitar in a band rehearsal. She decided to stick around for a few days and turned on her Uber app to make some money along the way.

It took Hedstrom three hours to figure out how to enter the designated parking lot for Uber drivers at the festival ground on Friday. Her first rider of the night, a young Canadian who boarded the car around 11:20 p.m., puked into a Hefty bag in the front seat.

Hedstrom didn’t much mind. She planned to go back to the festival grounds tonight, too.

“It doesn’t really require a lot of driving,” she said. “It requires a lot of sitting.”

She earned $200 in bonuses, $79 in fare, $15 in tips from shifts on Friday and Saturday, then took the day off on Sunday.

Across the street from the Planet Fitness, John Turner was taking a break at a pit stop Lyft had set up for drivers to charge their phones and grab snacks in the parking lot between a McDonald’s and a mattress store.

Before the festival, Lyft circulated a flier steering drivers toward Coachella, telling them they could count on “two weekends of high earnings.” As Turner sipped a Monster Energy drink, a few drivers played cornhole or walked back to their cars carrying cans of Coca-Cola and bags of Cheetos.

Turner, 48, was thinking back on his earnings for the weekend so far. He lives north of Palm Springs, earning about $300 a week from Lyft and Uber and another $150 to $200 by writing entries in an online encyclopedia about dog breeds. He had made $75 in two and a half hours on the road Friday, better than usual, and another $50 since he started driving shortly after noon on Saturday. Tonight, he thought he would try to avoid the Uber lot, heeding warnings from other drivers who got stuck waiting in line for two or more hours.

“I have neither the patience nor the bladder capacity to do that,” he said.

But sometimes, you can’t predict where a night on the road will take you.

Kenneth Martinson, a Palm Springs resident, had resolved to treat this weekend like any other. The 48-year-old works a full-time job as an orchestra teacher in Banning and drives for Lyft and Uber on nights and weekends, gigs he picked up after an orchestra that hired him in Long Island shuttered.

Martinson started his Saturday work shift shortly after 2 p.m., blasting the air conditioning in his hybrid Prius to stay cool in the midday heat. Later, when rides took him near the polo grounds, he found himself in a minefield of traffic and road closures.

By 10 p.m., hundreds of Uber drivers, a stray taxi and a stretch limousine were backed up all the way to Jackson Street, about two miles away from the Uber parking lot at Avenue 49 and Monroe. The air smelled of car exhaust as the vehicles inched forward. Snippets of Cardi B and an old Motown song drifted out of car windows like a radio stuck between stations.

"...I want to leave you Don't want to stay here Don't want to spend Another day here..."

A few drivers, feeling reckless, shimmied out of the gridlock and into the center turn lane, then zipped past the cars in line ahead of them. Seeing a pair of pedestrians trudging along a dim gravel path on the east side of the road, one driver shouted out the window to see if they were looking for a ride.

Martinson gave up before he even got into the Uber parking lot.

“It was an above-average weekend overall,” he said on Monday, “but not because I made any big huge effort to get to Coachella.”

He earned a total of $278 during two seven-hour driving shifts on Saturday and Sunday.

Mal Yaris, a driver from San Diego, tried a different strategy. She parked her car in the parking lot for Lyft drivers, napped and waited.

Ever since she got laid off from a call center in 2016, the 37-year-old has made a living working for Uber, Lyft, Postmates and Doordash. Before taxes, she said her income last year was about $45,000.

“My main worry is reaching 40 and not being as established as the people I know who have houses and live comfortably,” she said. “It’s just very difficult to be on the road all day, and I don’t get to spend time with friends and family as much” — just the strangers in her car.

During the music festival in 2018, Yaris estimated she made about $900 working six hours a day or less. This year, while she was enjoying the weather and meeting other drivers, traffic and lower pay rates had her on track to make less money for a longer weekend of work, she said. Plus, she had to cut her worknight short at 3 a.m. on Saturday when she heard her brakes squeaking, and she had paid for an Airbnb in Banning on Friday and Saturday.

She was so tired when she got back to San Diego, she slept from about 5:30 p.m. Monday afternoon to the same time on Tuesday. Counting bonuses, Yaris said she had earned about $700 over the weekend.

“I felt really drained this past weekend,” she said. “All that hours, all that miles on my car, and I still didn’t get close to last year’s numbers.”

Driving around in his white pickup truck, Alaynick calculated that he had ended the weekend at a slight loss. He earned $539 from Friday to Sunday in the Coachella Valley, but spent $300 on lodging, not to mention the cost of food and gas.

It had been a long weekend. On Friday, Alaynick waited almost two hours to pick up a passenger from the Uber lot and didn’t bother coming back for a second.

“Uber is trying to make themselves look good by giving these bonuses away, but yet these bonuses are highly unattainable,” he said.

By noon on Saturday, Alaynick was discouraged. He found himself back in the airport parking lot in Palm Springs. About 60 other drivers were idling in the lot around him, each lined up in a virtual queue on their smartphone apps, waiting for their turn to pick up riders from the airport terminal.

Alaynick put on a cowboy hat and leaned back on his truck, looking at his phone expectantly. It pinged. He hopped in the truck to retrieve his next rider.

Amy DiPierro covers business at The Desert Sun in Palm Springs. Reach her at amy.dipierro@desertsun.com or 760-218-2359. Follow her on Twitter @amydipierro.