A. At dinner time the pavements of Exeter fill with riders in yellow and teal, balancing insulated boxes. For the platforms they are partners; for the restaurants they are lifelines; for themselves, many say, they are spending over fifty-five hours a week on the road, rain or shine. At the busiest hour, a rider may carry three orders for three different platforms at once, racing the same traffic lights as everyone else.
B. The work is flexible, which riders genuinely value — a student can ride between lectures, a parent between school runs. But flexibility has a price: "no sick pay, no pension, and pay that drops the moment it rains, because suddenly every rider is chasing the same order. A few restaurants have begun paying riders directly for nearby orders, a small experiment that both sides watch with more hope than confidence.
C. Some cities have begun to react. Minimum pay per trip, accident insurance and access to public toilets have all appeared in recent rules, and one council now requires platforms to publish how much riders actually earn per hour — figures that turned out to be close to two fifths below what the apps advertise. Riders' groups helped collect the earnings data, screenshotting app dashboards over several weeks to build a fair sample.
D. Whether such arrangements can scale beyond a handful of streets, both sides agree, depends on rules that are not yet written. Platforms warn that higher costs mean fewer orders and fewer riders. Perhaps.
E. But the riders themselves keep the argument simple: the food still has to get there warm; the question is who pays for the warmth. Until that question has a clear answer, every cheap dinner includes a subsidy that somebody, somewhere is paying.
下面这句话出自哪个段落？
“For the platforms they are partners; for the restaurants they are lifelines; for themselves, many say, they are spending over fifty-five hours a week on the road, rain or shine.”