How safe is Uber?
Over the course of a year, Uber faced 32 accusations of rape or sexual assault in London alone.
If a stranger pulled up and offered you a lift home, it would be sensible to say no and quicken your pace in the opposite direction. You probably learned this in ‘How to not die 101’ as a kid. “Careful of strangers Barry, especially ones with sweets” your mum might’ve chimed as you skipped off to the playground. But then we grew up and Uber came along, a ride-hailing company that formalised and normalised the process of getting into the back of a stranger’s car. Sometimes these strangers even offer you sweets. Now through a slick app, with a few well-placed clicks, and in exchange for a fee, an Uber driver will whizz you around in 632 cities worldwide.
The company’s growth has been a phenomenon to behold, as consumers have become addicted to the sheer ease of getting around. No more trying to find an expensive cab in the rain, just click, boop, bop and you are home dry. The thing is that this explosive growth was built on a rather dangerous philosophy, one that we’ve berated before on The Zip Files — “Move fast and break things”. This approach has made Uber one of the most controversial startups of our generation as it goes about operating without license in cities worldwide, decimating local taxi industries, and all too often neglecting the safety of its riding customers.
Today we’re going to focus on that last point: rider safety. When you get in an Uber, just how safe are you? Can we trust that the company has adequately vetted the drivers who are carrying us around? The truth is, we simply don’t know — and that’s pretty scary. Uber is responsible for millions of trips worldwide every day and we just don’t know how safe these trips are. How often do drivers get into serious accidents? How often are passengers assaulted by the drivers and vice versa? We don’t know, and we don’t know because, unlike public transportation companies, Uber doesn’t have to report on such things. Something that seems increasingly ridiculous.
So what are the pillars of safety that should seem immediately relevant to you when getting into a stranger’s car? Firstly, is this guy or gal any good at driving? That’s pretty important. If they career off down the road, honking and swerving their way through fast-moving traffic then it’s less than ideal. If you are British then your sensibilities will probably see you sitting quietly, uncomplaining, politely praying to any god that will listen that this maniacal Sebastian Vettel wannabe isn’t going to kill you both. And then secondly, you’re hoping that this driver is just in the business to drive you where you want to go. Not to drive you somewhere else and try to sexually assault you. These are the two pillars of safety that Uber has a responsibility to control.
Last month an Uber in self-driving mode was navigating itself around in Arizona, as part of the company’s efforts to develop the autonomous technology, when it struck and killed a woman crossing the road. The car made no effort to break, or avoid the victim, showing that its systems just didn’t see her. They failed in a tragic way. It is true that the car that killed was not being driven by an Uber driver, and thus is not directly indicative of the level of driver ability at the ride-hailing startup, but nevertheless, it gives us an idea of Uber’s attitude towards safety. It was discovered after the accident that Uber had been struggling with its self-driving car technology. Google’s autonomous car arm, Waymo, can bumble along for an average of 5,600 miles before the need for human intervention. In Uber’s case intervention is necessary, on average, every 13 miles. That’s abysmal and testing on real roads with this kind of performance is life endangering.
So our first pillar of safety, driver ability, we might assume is a little unstable. It’s tough to really know. Anecdotally, I’ve made hundreds of journeys in Ubers over the years, and it’s rare that I find myself at the wanton whim of a maniac. In fact, I more often find myself feeling religious in the cars of traditional cab companies. Regardless, we deserve to know truly how well Uber does on this point; how their accident rate compares with the rest of the industry. In my opinion, this is data that they should be obliged to make available.
When it comes to our second pillar, the frequency of driver malevolence, there is a more easily discernible theme emerging. From mid-2015 to mid-2016 Uber faced 32 accusations of rape or sexual assault by drivers in London alone. Take a pause and consider that, because that is disgusting. That is a sex attack at the hand of an Uber driver every 11 days in London alone. These incidents are often dealt with by Uber out of the public eye, and settled before they make it to court. Indeed, the company claims that when we use the app we are agreeing to closed-door arbitration should we ever have a dispute with Uber. This practice of forced private arbitration is common amongst big corporations and by no means an exclusive Uber practice, but it is one that is coming under increasing fire amidst concerns that it silences victims to the benefit of the company’s bottom line and reputation. This week 14 women in the US petitioned Uber’s board to allow them to take their case beyond arbitration and to open court. In the letter to the board, they speak of their harrowing experiences in Uber cars.
One of the women awoke in the back seat of an Uber to find the driver sexually assaulting her. Another recounts a journey that was meant to end at her sister’s house, but instead ended at that of the Uber driver and was punctuated by rape. The women aren’t just seeking monetary compensation, but also that the company be more responsible in its hiring process. That Uber enhance the background checks that they do on drivers and take other related steps to make sure these incidents do not keep occurring.
Uber is making progress. In recent weeks they announced that they would employ a third party to monitor their drivers for criminal offences. Something which is an incremental step towards making the service safer. But they’ve got a long way to go. How long that way is, is a length that we cannot divine. They haven’t given us the data.
“Careful of strangers Barry, especially ones with sweets” your mum might have chimed as you skipped off to the playground. In the case of mine, she’s forgotten her own advice. As have most of us. It’s easy to ignore when the convenience and relative affordability of strangers with cars is factored in. The thing is that whilst these drivers will always be strangers to us, they should not be to Uber. Uber has a responsibility to know their drivers, to have a high degree of trust in any one of them. There will always be bad people, that’s a particularly unfortunate life truth, but they shouldn’t easily find their place in the employ of a ride-hailing startup. 32 Londoners should not have become the victims of sexual assault in 2015–2016, and I should not have to use a stat from that far back to illustrate my point. Uber, you are deliberating over whether to release the data behind such incidents, I implore you to do so. To improve, you must first acknowledge.
This piece was transcribed from The Zip Files — an irreverent weekly 20–25 minute podcast that I produce to help the busy millennial catch up with all of the week’s most important tech news. Here’s the episode in which this piece was featured:
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