- Uber's insurance and operational fees are among the biggest costs baked into a fare on the app. - A recent study found they can vary a lot between very similar ride-hailing trips. - Uber says it collects "overall insurance and operational expenses" instead of determining the cost of individual trips. Read Also Len Sherman, an executive in residence and adjunct professor at Columbia Business School, analyzed 120 Uber Reserve trips completed by one driver between Ithaca, New York, and an airport in Syracuse over a two-year period. The trips were similar in several ways, Sherman said. Each was driven by the same driver in the same Tesla Model Y. Each also followed essentially the same route along the freeway, covered nearly identical distances, and began and ended at similar locations. Across the roughly 60-mile trips, Uber's reported commercial auto insuranceand operational charge on each ride ranged from $13.75 to $50 an interesting result, Sherman said, given how similar the trips were from a risk standpoint. "When you have identical trips by the same driver, the same car, and the same route in the same distance, there should not be a much higher variation in what you say your commercial insurance costs are," Sherman told Business Insider. An Uber spokesperson told Business Insider that the fee covers government-mandated insurance for rides. The fee can vary due to multiple factors, "including the trip's origin city and distance, duration, time of day, and weather, and is included in the price you see in the Uber app before requesting a ride," the spokesperson said. Insurance accounts for one-fifth of the average ride-hailing fare Uber has long said that rider prices and driver earnings can change based on demand. The variation in insurance and operational fees in the study, though, was "twice as high