What does “rides of shame” here mean? Is that idiom?
Drive Lyft and Uber on Saturdays and Sundays, but in the mornings. See, although there are fewer drivers on the road, a lot of riders need to go places on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Sure, many of your pickups are going to be rides of shame, but often, those are good long highway rides with little traffic.
This is a play on words. The standard phrase is "walk of shame", namely the morning walk home after a casual sexual encounter the night before.
As FumbleFingers mentions, this is a cultural stereotype. You could probably even have a comical bit of installation art where painted on the sidewalk of a college campus there would be a shoe-print alternating with a bare footprint.
The underlying cultural assumption here is that many of those early-morning travellers on Saturday or Sunday will be people who had a one-night-stand (casual sex) on Friday or Saturday night, and are feeling somewhat ashamed of what they did, as they travel home the next morning by taxi / Uber / etc. Or possibly the cab-driver himself has suspicions about what they've been up to, and he thinks that their conduct was "shameful".
– FumbleFingers
transcribed from a comment
