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Business insider says 327k drivers were active in the month of Sept 2015 http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-doubles-its-drivers-in-2015-2015-10 http://www.bus

Business insider says 327k drivers were active in the month of Sept 2015 http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-doubles-its-drivers-in-2015-2015-10 http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-doubles-its-drivers-in-2... and WSJ says there were at least 160k by Jan 2015. https://www.wsj.com/articles/uber-touts-its-employment-opportunities-1422229862 https://www.wsj.com/articles/uber-touts-its-employment-oppor... http://www.businessofapps.com/data/uber-statistics/ http://www.businessofapps.com/data/uber-statistics/ Not much hard US-specific data after that, but lots of people speculate it's around 1M drivers now. https://therideshareguy.com/how-many-uber-drivers-are-there/ https://therideshareguy.com/how-many-uber-drivers-are-there/ In any case, these 103 sexual assault cases were over 4 years, or about 26 cases per year. Uber was giving 1.67M rides per day in March 2016. http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-says-its-profitable-in-the-us-2016-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-says-its-profitable-in-t... That works out to 608M per year. By now, it's probably doing at least a couple of billion per year, but even if we use the 2016 numbers that's one case of assault every 23M rides. The average ride is about 6 miles and the fatality rate from driving is 1.25 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles, so that means one traffic fatality every 13M miles. So a passenger is at least twice as likely -- and probably more like 10 times as likely -- to be killed in an accident than to be sexually assaulted by the driver.

rdlecler1 9y ago
This kind of agenda reporting is what gives mainstream news its fake-news reputation. A editor would make sure that the journalist put this into context (some simple math as the poster above has shown) and also have dug up some comparable statistics on taxis. It could be that taxis are 3x as dangerous for women and now the writer has put even more women in danger by steering them away from Uber toward taxis.
- jessriedel 9y ago
  Yes, although I would want an editor who saw this article to simply throw it out. The journalist who wrote it is so obviously slanted, and has made such little effort to give the reader the relevant facts, that there's no hope of obtaining something balanced from them.

rdlecler1 9y ago

This kind of agenda reporting is what gives mainstream news its fake-news reputation. A editor would make sure that the journalist put this into context (some simple math as the poster above has shown) and also have dug up some comparable statistics on taxis. It could be that taxis are 3x as dangerous for women and now the writer has put even more women in danger by steering them away from Uber toward taxis.

jessriedel 9y ago
Yes, although I would want an editor who saw this article to simply throw it out. The journalist who wrote it is so obviously slanted, and has made such little effort to give the reader the relevant facts, that there's no hope of obtaining something balanced from them.