Individual and Collaborative Behaviors of Rideshare Drivers in Protecting their Safety
-This work is presented at CSCW19 in Austin, TX.
Safety is important for all users of the ridesharing app, which includes both passengers and drivers. While passenger safety has received much attention from researchers, drivers’ safety has been relatively understudied. Since drivers are also an important user of ridesharing apps, we thought it would be interesting to investigate safety from the drivers’ perspectives. Thus, we decided to interview rideshare drivers in the United States to understand their safety perceptions while using ridesharing services.
We first investigated: what contributes to rideshare drivers’ feelings of being unsafe? We found interesting and overlapping results with that of passengers’ fears. Prominent examples included sexual harassment, assaults, and intoxicated passengers, which were universal concerns but more so for women and people of color. Drivers also reported trust issues related to unfamiliar passengers getting into their cars and sometimes not knowing basic information about them such as their real names, compared to what passengers see on the driver’s profile such as their names, car model, plate number and the idea of being vetted to a certain extent. Lastly, female drivers reported fears of male passengers, especially if they are multiple people and/or they are intoxicated.
We then investigated: what strategies do drivers adopt to enhance their safety? Drivers reported using video recording, carrying weapons, and the wise choice of when and where to work to protect themselves. Most interestingly, we found that drivers perceive themselves as part of a large, loosely coupled community that is sometimes international, as one of our participants said: “You know every man for himself mentality? Well, it’s not like that. We have to watch out [for our] fellow man. If not, then we are going downhill. Downhill fast.” In-app communication is not facilitated for drivers, however, since drivers can rate their passengers, they used this feature to send a message in disguise to the next driver like, “hey be on the lookout for this person”. Off-app communication between drivers was prominent especially on social media such as Twitter, Facebook Groups and online forums. Drivers either seek safety information or provide information and support for their fellow drivers.
We lastly questioned: from the drivers’ perspective, what have the companies provided to ensure drivers’ safety? Drivers reported positive contributions such as companies’ tracking rides and companies’ knowledge of working credit cards for the passengers, which they infer as a positive contribution to their safety. However, the majority of our drivers (mostly veteran rideshare drivers) reported negative safety contributions from their companies such as lack of job security. They put it in the sense that “the driver is put in a position of safety or security from a job security aspect, so many drivers are afraid to even do anything that may ensure their safety or protection due to fear of losing their job.” Low fares were another negative contribution, “It’s so cheap so you attract people who are jerks… they are taking these things for granted and again it’s because of the dropping fares.” Lastly, drivers reported a lack of support when they were encountered with a safety predicament. A driver reported being attacked by a passenger, reporting to the company, and being promised not to be linked back with the same passenger, however, the driver was matched with the same passenger again and “in this time, he had a knife and a gun on him…”.
We end our work with thorough discussions of the results and some design suggestions to improve the safety of the drivers. For example, we propose reinforcing the safety of drivers through sending notifications for passengers once the ride is confirmed, which could include reminders about the importance of safe behaviors and to respect the driver. In terms of video recording, companies could enforce this through recording via the app to reduce the cost of installing a separate dash cam which eventually will enhance the safety of both drivers and passengers, a common strategy already used in taxis.
In this work, we aimed to shed some light on the safety of an important user of ridesharing apps, the driver. We are glad this work will be presented at CSCW19 and we hope the discussions will spark new ideas for us and other researchers to investigate and explore.
This blog post and the full paper it describes are done by Mashael Yousef Almoqbel and Donghee Yvette Wohn. For more details, please check the full paper published in the proceedings of CSCW 2019. If you have any questions about the work, feel free to contact Almoqbel at ma735@njit.edu or Wohn at wohn@njit.edu.
Paper citation: Almoqbel, M. Y., & Wohn, D. Y. (2019). Individual and Collaborative Behaviors of Rideshare Drivers in Protecting their Safety. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 3(CSCW), 217.
