6 ms·

Ride That Nearly Killed Me Changed How I Think About Ride-Hailing Apps

50 points by monsieurpng 8y ago

icyftw 8y ago
The title is misleading; the author was using a ride sharing app, not a cab.
- el_cujo 8y ago
  Yeah I'm not sure why the author chose that title, it makes you think its going to be a "pro-ride sharing/anti-traditional taxi" piece. I wonder if this is a click-bait strategy.
  - d0gsg0w00f 8y ago
    I see they changed the title now.
  - sthgrau 8y ago
    If you wanted ride sharing to be treated the same as traditional taxis, you could erase the difference in people's minds by referring to them as the same thing.
  - rjf72 8y ago
    Could be an allusion to the fact that the driver was a licensed taxi driver.
  - mikeash 8y ago
    I don’t know about Bloomberg specifically, but typically authors don’t write the headlines in media.
- pwagland 8y ago
  There is a deliberate attempt to conflate the two, since they are essentially the same service, and many people want them regulated the same. There is a correspondingly deliberate attempt to ensure that the two remain separate in peoples minds, to ensure that Grab, and the other "* sharing" apps, don't get the same regulations applied to them as the industries that they are trying to disrupt. But make no mistake, the services that Grab/Uber/Lyft/other "ride sharing apps" provides is for 99.99% of consumers a direct, possibly cheaper, replacement for a cab service.
  - dahart 8y ago
    > the services that Grab/Uber/Lyft/other “ride sharing apps” provides is for 99.99% of consumers a direct, possibly cheaper, replacement for a cab service. I think that, reading between the lines, this article is talking about that point. I know cab services are crappy most places, but ride sharing apps are cheaper precisely because they’re trying to build a market without any regulation and they’re undercutting cabs in part because cabs cost more. The business innovation of ride sharing apps is in externalizing the costs of ride sharing, from the maintenance costs of cars onto the drivers, to the lack of unions & benefits, to the “disruptive” startup mentality where Uber justifies breaking laws because it’s good for business, to lower regulatory oversight and fees.
    - icebraining 8y ago
      Taxi drivers in the US, where Uber/Lyft started, were already considered contractors without unions & benefits, and they paid to rent the cars with medallion from cab companies (they started each day over $100 in the red).
- Legogris 8y ago
  In Singapore, Grab drivers need a commercial license. The driver in this case had a taxi license. I'd argue that "cab" is not a misnomer here.
- jtms 8y ago
  In Singapore, at least while I was living there, Grab taxi was used to hail actual taxis. Think traditional taxi company, but happens to have a mobile app that (mostly) works well. I guess now that they bought up Uber’s operations it’s a mixture of traditional and Uber style freelancers.
sixtypoundhound 8y ago
While I feel sympathy for the writer, there are few items of note before applying this beyond Singapore: - Believe all drivers for hire in the US are required to have mandatory liability insurance; that would address at least part of the financial consequences of the accident. - Don't the market leading US ride-share apps track driver performance and post ratings? - Driver ride ratings are likely a poor predictor of severe events; you probably need something more along the lines of hard breaking incidents per mile (used to predict issues for trucks and service vehicles). IOT can get you this. I think more importantly, the driver already had a legally issued cab license... if he wasn't driving for a ride-share company, he would have been driving a regular cab. The risk management failure was at the state level not the company.
- tejohnso 8y ago
  I was looking for some type of uber vs traditional cab comparison and couldn't find any justification for the headline. The quote on your last point is: > I asked him how he’d passed Grab’s driver-screening process. He said there was no issue, because he already had a taxi driver’s license. Well, that's pretty much the end of the story then. At least, the story that I thought it was based on the headline. Driving is dangerous. The fact that an accident occurred in a car hired via app vs traditional street side hailing or telephone call doesn't seem very relevant.
- Zigurd 8y ago
  Re hard braking: Smooth driving may be a nice-to-have, rather than an clear indicator. Or, to put it another way, if there is a useful signal in apps that score driving smoothness and lack of distraction from phone calls and texts, extracting that signal from the noise of whether the driver frequents dangerous roads, drives at night, drives fatigued, intoxicated, is using a second mobile device, in bad weather, etc. isn't easy. Or, to put it yet another way, the real signal isn't in the score provided to the driver, it may be something the driver would consider unfair and outside their control in many cases. These apps influence drivers to drive more smoothly, which is useful for ride hailing since it improves the perceived quality of the ride, but that's much less directly connected to safety.
toolz 8y ago
What a strange article. It had plenty of emotional language that led me to believe there was some build up to a story about the driver being horribly unqualified to drive, but in the end the driver already had a taxi license. What was the point? That we should use taxi's without apps instead? Why? Because sometimes wrecks happen and this time it happened in a ride-share? There were some anecdotes about a driver driving for 12 hours and another driver claiming they hadn't been behind the wheel in years, but how reliable is that data I wonder? I was hoping to learn something other than the authors bias.
- eh78ssxv2f 8y ago
  Yeah, I found the article to be very confusing too. The author seems to be upset that the driver and the passenger lost a lot of money/ body parts, but Grab did not lose anything. Sure, but the author fails to explain why Gab should lose anything? It's like complaining that my Prius had an accident with somebody's Tesla, but Toyota and Tesla CEOs did not lose anything. Why should they?
  - simion314 8y ago
    Maybe the company should have insurance if something bad happens? But if the law does nor require this then I am sure this companies would try to shift the blame and have the driver pay.
  - mikeash 8y ago
    It’s more like complaining that you were in an accident that was the fault of a Toyota employee, but Toyota didn’t lose anything. Should a company be liable for losses caused by their workers while they’re on the job? Seems to me like the answer is yes, at least most of the time.
    - isostatic 8y ago
      Sal's cars, based in Northwich in the UK, charge drivers a 'radio fee', and send cabs their way. They don't employ the drivers, they don't own the cars. I struggle to see how Uber is any different to Sal's cars. In the UK, Uber requires its drivers to have taxi insurance. In addition, it has 'backstop insurance', just in case an uber driver had lost their insurance / license. I'd far rather be in an Uber in the UK than a typical minicab in the UK. Or a typical yellow taxi in new york.
kayoone 8y ago
Even though this driver had a license, many drivers in other countries where Uber operates do not. Part of why classic Uber is not in Germany is because you need an extra license to be allowed to drive passengers around for money, this includes deep knowledge of the area you are working in and a bunch of other tests and checks. I think it makes sense that not just anyone is allowed to do this, even though i see a lot of cab drivers driving pretty recklessly, but in general they at least seem very experienced and the cars are usually very modern and safe.
chrismeller 8y ago
I don’t really understand what this article is trying to accomplish. Most of it is purely about the emotional impact of a car accident and realistically that’s going to be largely the same even if you were the one driving the car, it follows the same basic grief cycle as any tragedy. > Singapore’s government requires drivers for services such as Grab to be licensed, a process that includes a background check, medical screening, classroom instruction, and a written test. The city-state used to require 60 hours of training for taxi drivers to earn a vocational license. That’s now 25, which is still longer than the 10-hour course required for private-hire car drivers. In those 10 hours—two of which can be done outside the classroom as “self-study”—applicants are supposed to learn all they need to know about service quality and road rules. > Grab notes that Singapore law forbids the company access to driving or criminal records, and that authorities wouldn’t have issued a vocational license if they judged Chia to have a poor record. Those two quotes pretty much sum up the rest and, at least to me, paint a different picture than the one she drew. Even if you somehow single out a ride hailing service as being different than an actual taxi or driving yourself / carpooling with a friend / etc. (which hardly seems to be justified in this case) it seems like Grab followed the law and if anything there is blame to be placed upon the government of Singapore by restricting their access to additional information. > But we deserve more than expressions of remorse from companies such as Grab. Detailed safety records would be a good place to start. I’m not sure how healthcare works in Singapore, but there was no mention of medical bills, so I’m curious what exactly Grab could or should have done above and beyond having their CEO visit her multiple times? > Grab says that at the time of the accident, Chia had a valid license and had completed more than 500 rides on the platform with a good passenger rating, and his record was spotless. So the driver had a spotless record while at Grab and the company has no access to his prior driving history. Exactly what other detailed safety records should they start with?
pryelluw 8y ago
This past week I rode a lyft to a tech meetup in Atlanta. The drive was about an hour away, which meant that the fastest route was through the interstate (I75). The car was a 4 year old Toyota Camry. It looked very nice from the outside and was very clean inside. The driver was a very friendly man who drove very carefully. Rather surprising here in Atlanta. However, the one thing that made the ride highly dangerous: The car had a blown strut (shock absorber) on the front right side. It was not very noticeable at low speeds. There were little vibrations coming through the floorpan but it could have easily been the tires needing a rotation or slightly out of balance. When we got into I75 that's when I was scared for my life. Doing 70+ MPH on a car with a blown front strut is very dangerous. It vibrated and shook as if it was going to break in two any moment. I told the driver to slow the fuck down because we would have an accident. He did. Then I explained why. The driver mentioned being in an accident a month ago. He had fixed the cosmetics, but not the mechanicam because "a friend told him it was ok". I made it to the tech meetup in one piece. Yes, I could have requested another car, but decided to not stop on an unknown area of Atlanta. Lyft must make sure the cars are in good mechanical condition. It must also provide a way to report this sort of incident directly. How do I know about what was wrong with the car? Im a master mechanic who used to specialize and work for Toyota. This incident made me realize Im better off driving downtown. Which is a bit insane given how awful people drive there.
- isostatic 8y ago
  How would this be any difference with a legacy taxi company?
  - pryelluw 8y ago
    I understand where you are coming from, but the question is flawed. All taxi / ride companies must meet some kind of safety and maintenance standards. No matter who it is. Looking back and saying "Taxi companies were also as bad" is a terrible way to dismiss the need for regulation. These contractors should have their cars inspected every n months or n amount of miles by a certified shop. Lyft should also provide a way to allow users to report safety / mechanical problems and temporarily remove that car from service (not the driver) until it is fixed.
rjf72 8y ago
There's one major problem with apps of any sort of scale that involve any scenario where dangerous accidents are possible. The problem is that as these apps scale, these accidents will happen, and with a degree of regularity that also scales alongside the growth of the app/company - even when there is absolutely 0 negligence involved. And the media then takes these anecdotal bits and implies they are representative of the service itself, further implying negligence. In this case the article mentions that the driver was an actively licensed taxi/vocational driver that had been driving taxis on and off for 40+ years. And had completed more than 500 flawless rides on Grab in his month of work with them, with a good overall review rating. The only thing the author mentions as something trying to be framed as a red flag is that in his decades of driving, the driver states he had "several small and big road accidents." Let's look into that. This [1] article from the NYTimes indicates that taxis get into crashes about 4.6 times per million miles driven, which was substantially better than the rate for non-taxi drivers. Another search indicated that taxi drivers hit around 70k miles per year. [2] So we now have the numbers we need. 1 million / 70k / 4.6 = 1 crash per 3.1 years. That means a perfectly average taxi driver gets into a crash every 3.1 years of driving on average. A taxi driver that's been driving for 40 years would expect to get into an average of about 13 crashes. Given that the article mentions our driver drove taxis "on and off", his accounting of "several" means he was probably just about perfectly average. The point of this is that anecdotal evidence is irrelevant. I suppose like the old saying goes, Dog bites man is not news. Man bites dog is news. Yet when all you see from media is reporting these incidents of man bites dog, it leads to a distorted worldview where there seems to be a rash of men biting dogs. [1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/28/nyregion/that-wild-taxi-ride-is-safer-than-you-think-a-study-says.html https://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/28/nyregion/that-wild-taxi-r... [2] - https://www.quora.com/How-many-miles-does-a-NYC-taxi-do-in-its-life-as-a-taxi https://www.quora.com/How-many-miles-does-a-NYC-taxi-do-in-i...
satellitec4t 8y ago
One thing I notice is she says the ride app GPS took the driver through local roads instead of the highway. I had a similar experience with Uber recently. There is a road that goes pretty much straight from the airport to my house, though it's a busy, slow road. Instead the uber gps had us going all over the place, through many intersections and left turns. It might have saved 1 or 2 minutes, but surely cost way more in gas (and CO2) and was much more likely to result in an accident. I felt bad for the driver, having to drive such a confusing and stressful route. I'm not sure if it made my route more expensive. The cost is set before we leave, so any route has the same cost. But the drivers are paid more the farther they go, so it costs uber more to pay him, when he could have gone a way that's much shorter and doesn't take any longer.
- llampx 8y ago
  How closely do Uber drivers have to follow the suggested route? Do they get penalized if they often don't follow it?
jscholes 8y ago
The CEO himself sent texts to the article's author, and visited her several times. How many people get a visit or a text from Uber's CEO when there's an accident, when a disabled person is refused service because of their assistance dog, etc? Not many, because they're not journalists. If a company lays on everything they've got when they know the subject of an accident is a prominent journalist, but that person ends up thinking they should be doing more regardless... that makes it pretty clear these companies can do better.
joshuaheard 8y ago
Cabbies aren't much better. I had a cab driver once that apparently didn't realize the gas and brake pedals had a range of motion. He stomped on the gas pedal to the floor to go, and stomped on the brake to the floor to slow down. And so we went down the street every 100 feet, accelerating like mad then screeching the tires to stop, over and over again.
- vonseel 8y ago
  An Uber driver did this with me recently. It was late at night (bar pickups). The driver was an older, professional looking gentleman but told me he was tired and “had not driven in a few months”.
  - illumin8 8y ago
    That's code for "I've never driven before today and I don't have a license, but my family member let me login to his Uber account and drive his car..."
MrTonyD 8y ago
I travel a lot - typically two weeks each month. I view Uber as very risky compared to cabs. I once had an Uber driver whose phone got flaky during the trip, so he said that he would drop me off (he turned into an industrial park area that was completely deserted to leave me.) He said that if Uber didn't see him complete the trip then he wouldn't get paid and would be working for free, so he wouldn't take me any further than where we happened to be. Another time I had a 1 mile commute in 115 degree heat. Well, no Uber driver would come to pick me up for a one mile commute. I tried and tried for over an hour, while other people were catching Ubers with no problem. Another time I had to go to the next town over, and nobody wanted to pick me up for that trip, so I again found myself stranded by using Uber. Then there is the fact that so many Uber drivers are obviouly just barely surviving financially, and all that entails. I've been taking taxis for decades - and never had any problems in the United States.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
purplezooey 8y ago
We're generally not very good at handling market externalities like this. Injuries. Housing. Pollution. Corruption. We tend to think the market will sort everything out. The question is, how many people have to die or suffer while it corrects itself?

50 points by monsieurpng 8y ago

icyftw 8y ago

The title is misleading; the author was using a ride sharing app, not a cab.

el_cujo 8y ago
Yeah I'm not sure why the author chose that title, it makes you think its going to be a "pro-ride sharing/anti-traditional taxi" piece. I wonder if this is a click-bait strategy.
- d0gsg0w00f 8y ago
  I see they changed the title now.
- sthgrau 8y ago
  If you wanted ride sharing to be treated the same as traditional taxis, you could erase the difference in people's minds by referring to them as the same thing.
- rjf72 8y ago
  Could be an allusion to the fact that the driver was a licensed taxi driver.
- mikeash 8y ago
  I don’t know about Bloomberg specifically, but typically authors don’t write the headlines in media.
pwagland 8y ago
There is a deliberate attempt to conflate the two, since they are essentially the same service, and many people want them regulated the same. There is a correspondingly deliberate attempt to ensure that the two remain separate in peoples minds, to ensure that Grab, and the other "* sharing" apps, don't get the same regulations applied to them as the industries that they are trying to disrupt. But make no mistake, the services that Grab/Uber/Lyft/other "ride sharing apps" provides is for 99.99% of consumers a direct, possibly cheaper, replacement for a cab service.
- dahart 8y ago
  > the services that Grab/Uber/Lyft/other “ride sharing apps” provides is for 99.99% of consumers a direct, possibly cheaper, replacement for a cab service. I think that, reading between the lines, this article is talking about that point. I know cab services are crappy most places, but ride sharing apps are cheaper precisely because they’re trying to build a market without any regulation and they’re undercutting cabs in part because cabs cost more. The business innovation of ride sharing apps is in externalizing the costs of ride sharing, from the maintenance costs of cars onto the drivers, to the lack of unions & benefits, to the “disruptive” startup mentality where Uber justifies breaking laws because it’s good for business, to lower regulatory oversight and fees.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    Taxi drivers in the US, where Uber/Lyft started, were already considered contractors without unions & benefits, and they paid to rent the cars with medallion from cab companies (they started each day over $100 in the red).
Legogris 8y ago
In Singapore, Grab drivers need a commercial license. The driver in this case had a taxi license. I'd argue that "cab" is not a misnomer here.
jtms 8y ago
In Singapore, at least while I was living there, Grab taxi was used to hail actual taxis. Think traditional taxi company, but happens to have a mobile app that (mostly) works well. I guess now that they bought up Uber’s operations it’s a mixture of traditional and Uber style freelancers.

sixtypoundhound 8y ago

While I feel sympathy for the writer, there are few items of note before applying this beyond Singapore: - Believe all drivers for hire in the US are required to have mandatory liability insurance; that would address at least part of the financial consequences of the accident. - Don't the market leading US ride-share apps track driver performance and post ratings? - Driver ride ratings are likely a poor predictor of severe events; you probably need something more along the lines of hard breaking incidents per mile (used to predict issues for trucks and service vehicles). IOT can get you this. I think more importantly, the driver already had a legally issued cab license... if he wasn't driving for a ride-share company, he would have been driving a regular cab. The risk management failure was at the state level not the company.

tejohnso 8y ago
I was looking for some type of uber vs traditional cab comparison and couldn't find any justification for the headline. The quote on your last point is: > I asked him how he’d passed Grab’s driver-screening process. He said there was no issue, because he already had a taxi driver’s license. Well, that's pretty much the end of the story then. At least, the story that I thought it was based on the headline. Driving is dangerous. The fact that an accident occurred in a car hired via app vs traditional street side hailing or telephone call doesn't seem very relevant.
Zigurd 8y ago
Re hard braking: Smooth driving may be a nice-to-have, rather than an clear indicator. Or, to put it another way, if there is a useful signal in apps that score driving smoothness and lack of distraction from phone calls and texts, extracting that signal from the noise of whether the driver frequents dangerous roads, drives at night, drives fatigued, intoxicated, is using a second mobile device, in bad weather, etc. isn't easy. Or, to put it yet another way, the real signal isn't in the score provided to the driver, it may be something the driver would consider unfair and outside their control in many cases. These apps influence drivers to drive more smoothly, which is useful for ride hailing since it improves the perceived quality of the ride, but that's much less directly connected to safety.

toolz 8y ago

What a strange article. It had plenty of emotional language that led me to believe there was some build up to a story about the driver being horribly unqualified to drive, but in the end the driver already had a taxi license. What was the point? That we should use taxi's without apps instead? Why? Because sometimes wrecks happen and this time it happened in a ride-share? There were some anecdotes about a driver driving for 12 hours and another driver claiming they hadn't been behind the wheel in years, but how reliable is that data I wonder? I was hoping to learn something other than the authors bias.

eh78ssxv2f 8y ago
Yeah, I found the article to be very confusing too. The author seems to be upset that the driver and the passenger lost a lot of money/ body parts, but Grab did not lose anything. Sure, but the author fails to explain why Gab should lose anything? It's like complaining that my Prius had an accident with somebody's Tesla, but Toyota and Tesla CEOs did not lose anything. Why should they?
- simion314 8y ago
  Maybe the company should have insurance if something bad happens? But if the law does nor require this then I am sure this companies would try to shift the blame and have the driver pay.
- mikeash 8y ago
  It’s more like complaining that you were in an accident that was the fault of a Toyota employee, but Toyota didn’t lose anything. Should a company be liable for losses caused by their workers while they’re on the job? Seems to me like the answer is yes, at least most of the time.
  - isostatic 8y ago
    Sal's cars, based in Northwich in the UK, charge drivers a 'radio fee', and send cabs their way. They don't employ the drivers, they don't own the cars. I struggle to see how Uber is any different to Sal's cars. In the UK, Uber requires its drivers to have taxi insurance. In addition, it has 'backstop insurance', just in case an uber driver had lost their insurance / license. I'd far rather be in an Uber in the UK than a typical minicab in the UK. Or a typical yellow taxi in new york.

kayoone 8y ago

Even though this driver had a license, many drivers in other countries where Uber operates do not. Part of why classic Uber is not in Germany is because you need an extra license to be allowed to drive passengers around for money, this includes deep knowledge of the area you are working in and a bunch of other tests and checks. I think it makes sense that not just anyone is allowed to do this, even though i see a lot of cab drivers driving pretty recklessly, but in general they at least seem very experienced and the cars are usually very modern and safe.

chrismeller 8y ago

I don’t really understand what this article is trying to accomplish. Most of it is purely about the emotional impact of a car accident and realistically that’s going to be largely the same even if you were the one driving the car, it follows the same basic grief cycle as any tragedy. > Singapore’s government requires drivers for services such as Grab to be licensed, a process that includes a background check, medical screening, classroom instruction, and a written test. The city-state used to require 60 hours of training for taxi drivers to earn a vocational license. That’s now 25, which is still longer than the 10-hour course required for private-hire car drivers. In those 10 hours—two of which can be done outside the classroom as “self-study”—applicants are supposed to learn all they need to know about service quality and road rules. > Grab notes that Singapore law forbids the company access to driving or criminal records, and that authorities wouldn’t have issued a vocational license if they judged Chia to have a poor record. Those two quotes pretty much sum up the rest and, at least to me, paint a different picture than the one she drew. Even if you somehow single out a ride hailing service as being different than an actual taxi or driving yourself / carpooling with a friend / etc. (which hardly seems to be justified in this case) it seems like Grab followed the law and if anything there is blame to be placed upon the government of Singapore by restricting their access to additional information. > But we deserve more than expressions of remorse from companies such as Grab. Detailed safety records would be a good place to start. I’m not sure how healthcare works in Singapore, but there was no mention of medical bills, so I’m curious what exactly Grab could or should have done above and beyond having their CEO visit her multiple times? > Grab says that at the time of the accident, Chia had a valid license and had completed more than 500 rides on the platform with a good passenger rating, and his record was spotless. So the driver had a spotless record while at Grab and the company has no access to his prior driving history. Exactly what other detailed safety records should they start with?

pryelluw 8y ago

This past week I rode a lyft to a tech meetup in Atlanta. The drive was about an hour away, which meant that the fastest route was through the interstate (I75). The car was a 4 year old Toyota Camry. It looked very nice from the outside and was very clean inside. The driver was a very friendly man who drove very carefully. Rather surprising here in Atlanta. However, the one thing that made the ride highly dangerous: The car had a blown strut (shock absorber) on the front right side. It was not very noticeable at low speeds. There were little vibrations coming through the floorpan but it could have easily been the tires needing a rotation or slightly out of balance. When we got into I75 that's when I was scared for my life. Doing 70+ MPH on a car with a blown front strut is very dangerous. It vibrated and shook as if it was going to break in two any moment. I told the driver to slow the fuck down because we would have an accident. He did. Then I explained why. The driver mentioned being in an accident a month ago. He had fixed the cosmetics, but not the mechanicam because "a friend told him it was ok". I made it to the tech meetup in one piece. Yes, I could have requested another car, but decided to not stop on an unknown area of Atlanta. Lyft must make sure the cars are in good mechanical condition. It must also provide a way to report this sort of incident directly. How do I know about what was wrong with the car? Im a master mechanic who used to specialize and work for Toyota. This incident made me realize Im better off driving downtown. Which is a bit insane given how awful people drive there.

isostatic 8y ago
How would this be any difference with a legacy taxi company?
- pryelluw 8y ago
  I understand where you are coming from, but the question is flawed. All taxi / ride companies must meet some kind of safety and maintenance standards. No matter who it is. Looking back and saying "Taxi companies were also as bad" is a terrible way to dismiss the need for regulation. These contractors should have their cars inspected every n months or n amount of miles by a certified shop. Lyft should also provide a way to allow users to report safety / mechanical problems and temporarily remove that car from service (not the driver) until it is fixed.

rjf72 8y ago

There's one major problem with apps of any sort of scale that involve any scenario where dangerous accidents are possible. The problem is that as these apps scale, these accidents will happen, and with a degree of regularity that also scales alongside the growth of the app/company - even when there is absolutely 0 negligence involved. And the media then takes these anecdotal bits and implies they are representative of the service itself, further implying negligence. In this case the article mentions that the driver was an actively licensed taxi/vocational driver that had been driving taxis on and off for 40+ years. And had completed more than 500 flawless rides on Grab in his month of work with them, with a good overall review rating. The only thing the author mentions as something trying to be framed as a red flag is that in his decades of driving, the driver states he had "several small and big road accidents." Let's look into that. This [1] article from the NYTimes indicates that taxis get into crashes about 4.6 times per million miles driven, which was substantially better than the rate for non-taxi drivers. Another search indicated that taxi drivers hit around 70k miles per year. [2] So we now have the numbers we need. 1 million / 70k / 4.6 = 1 crash per 3.1 years. That means a perfectly average taxi driver gets into a crash every 3.1 years of driving on average. A taxi driver that's been driving for 40 years would expect to get into an average of about 13 crashes. Given that the article mentions our driver drove taxis "on and off", his accounting of "several" means he was probably just about perfectly average. The point of this is that anecdotal evidence is irrelevant. I suppose like the old saying goes, Dog bites man is not news. Man bites dog is news. Yet when all you see from media is reporting these incidents of man bites dog, it leads to a distorted worldview where there seems to be a rash of men biting dogs. [1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/28/nyregion/that-wild-taxi-ride-is-safer-than-you-think-a-study-says.html https://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/28/nyregion/that-wild-taxi-r... [2] - https://www.quora.com/How-many-miles-does-a-NYC-taxi-do-in-its-life-as-a-taxi https://www.quora.com/How-many-miles-does-a-NYC-taxi-do-in-i...

satellitec4t 8y ago

One thing I notice is she says the ride app GPS took the driver through local roads instead of the highway. I had a similar experience with Uber recently. There is a road that goes pretty much straight from the airport to my house, though it's a busy, slow road. Instead the uber gps had us going all over the place, through many intersections and left turns. It might have saved 1 or 2 minutes, but surely cost way more in gas (and CO2) and was much more likely to result in an accident. I felt bad for the driver, having to drive such a confusing and stressful route. I'm not sure if it made my route more expensive. The cost is set before we leave, so any route has the same cost. But the drivers are paid more the farther they go, so it costs uber more to pay him, when he could have gone a way that's much shorter and doesn't take any longer.

llampx 8y ago
How closely do Uber drivers have to follow the suggested route? Do they get penalized if they often don't follow it?

jscholes 8y ago

The CEO himself sent texts to the article's author, and visited her several times. How many people get a visit or a text from Uber's CEO when there's an accident, when a disabled person is refused service because of their assistance dog, etc? Not many, because they're not journalists. If a company lays on everything they've got when they know the subject of an accident is a prominent journalist, but that person ends up thinking they should be doing more regardless... that makes it pretty clear these companies can do better.

joshuaheard 8y ago

Cabbies aren't much better. I had a cab driver once that apparently didn't realize the gas and brake pedals had a range of motion. He stomped on the gas pedal to the floor to go, and stomped on the brake to the floor to slow down. And so we went down the street every 100 feet, accelerating like mad then screeching the tires to stop, over and over again.

vonseel 8y ago
An Uber driver did this with me recently. It was late at night (bar pickups). The driver was an older, professional looking gentleman but told me he was tired and “had not driven in a few months”.
- illumin8 8y ago
  That's code for "I've never driven before today and I don't have a license, but my family member let me login to his Uber account and drive his car..."

MrTonyD 8y ago

I travel a lot - typically two weeks each month. I view Uber as very risky compared to cabs. I once had an Uber driver whose phone got flaky during the trip, so he said that he would drop me off (he turned into an industrial park area that was completely deserted to leave me.) He said that if Uber didn't see him complete the trip then he wouldn't get paid and would be working for free, so he wouldn't take me any further than where we happened to be. Another time I had a 1 mile commute in 115 degree heat. Well, no Uber driver would come to pick me up for a one mile commute. I tried and tried for over an hour, while other people were catching Ubers with no problem. Another time I had to go to the next town over, and nobody wanted to pick me up for that trip, so I again found myself stranded by using Uber. Then there is the fact that so many Uber drivers are obviouly just barely surviving financially, and all that entails. I've been taking taxis for decades - and never had any problems in the United States.

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purplezooey 8y ago

We're generally not very good at handling market externalities like this. Injuries. Housing. Pollution. Corruption. We tend to think the market will sort everything out. The question is, how many people have to die or suffer while it corrects itself?