What kind of details do you think go into this rating? My guess: how long driver waits for you to get in the car, how drunk and annoying you are, how much you tip (do they see this before rating?), how profitable your ride is.
I suspect most drivers, like most passengers, give a 5.0 to almost everyone, but dock points for being a dick. It just seems there's no other way to differentiate passengers, since they'll be paying the fee regardless.
For what it's worth, drivers with a rating of less than 4.3 or so are booted from the service.
I've heard of people in my city having trouble and getting a driver to accept, most probably due to him having a low rating (whereas I never have trouble finding a driver)
Low ratings are not the only reason that could happen. Uber drivers run businesses. They are not universal service taxis (which often flout the universal service rule, to be true).
Your request for service includes several non-price elements to it, one of which is your perceived likelihood to be a hassle (and reflected in your star rating), one is the amount of unpaid travel required to get to you, and one is what the driver perceives as likely to be your destination. All else being equal, drivers would prefer to end up in portions of the city with a high density of quality fares (say, an airport, the startup district(s) in SF, etc) as opposed to portions of the city with a low density of quality fares (say, the outer edge of the service area).
If drivers make a habit out of taking "bad" trips, their Uber business gets meaningfully less lucrative. Accordingly, expect them to actively avoid "bad" trips. If one's travel patterns routinely result in drivers perceiving you to require "bad" trips, one is going to have a far different experience with Uber relative to a high-frequency no-hassle business traveler.
Ah my mistake. I haven't used Uber in a while but seemed to remember a screen where you can optionally increase gratuity. I guess I'm confusing it with the Square interface. Who can keep up nowadays...
I suspect most drivers, like most passengers, give a 5.0 to almost everyone, but dock points for being a dick. It just seems there's no other way to differentiate passengers, since they'll be paying the fee regardless.