By David Hodes
The growing popularity of the ride-booking services brings with it safety concerns.
Ask anyone about ride-booking services like Uber and Lyft in the Metro-D.C. area, and you get a ton of happy-faced responses. But some riders sense a dark side to these services.
Take Janice (name changed), who says an Uber driver asked her for her phone number before dropping her off at her apartment. She saw him circling her block weeks later.
Then there’s Susan, another woman in the Clarendon district, who likes Uber but is sure to have drivers drop her off at the end of her street so they don’t see where she lives—just to be safe.
Think about it: You are inside a moving vehicle, being ferried to your destination by someone who just one day decided to be a driver and make quick money, who went through a quick online registration process and who basically has your life in his or her hands. Safe? Or scary?
It can be scary for the drivers, too. There have been cases of drunk passengers taking out aggression on drivers, something Uber hopes to alleviate by putting Bop It toys in the back to “keep drunk riders entertained so they don’t distract their driver,” as stated in a release.
But there are still an alarming amount of incidents with the passengers as victim. A taxi association public awareness campaign, Who’s Driving You? posts a running list of Uber- and Lyft-related incidents—deaths, assaults, kidnappings.The list currently stands at more than 40 alleged sexual assault incidents by ride-booking services in various U.S. cities since July 2013, most of these by drivers.
On the list of sexual assaults are incidents in D.C. and Northern Virginia, including one Uber driver who picked up a passenger in Clarendon and allegedly fondled the female rider at her Woodbridge destination (July 12, 2015; charges were eventually dismissed) and another incident where an Uber driver was charged with second-degree sexual abuse when taking a female rider home after a night of drinking in the District (July 20, 2015; the Uber driver was found not guilty in a jury trial).
Other police data about Uber and Lyft is available, but details are still being analyzed. According to Fairfax County police, there were 287 criminal incidents involving Uber and Lyft, including 39 assaults, two of a sexual nature, in 2015. The Fairfax police also reported 7,272 criminal events involving taxis in the county in 2015. Those numbers do not differentiate between driver as victim or passenger as victim. In Arlington County in 2015, there were 34 criminal incidents involving Uber and Lyft, compared to 29 regular cab incidents, including one sexual assault by an Uber driver at 900 S. Randolph St. in August.
According to Uber spokesperson Kaitlin Durkosh, using the Uber platform to coordinate multiple jurisdiction criminal background checks on drivers before they are approved is just one part of the Uber safety picture. Uber also offers a feature called SafetyNet, where a passenger can share ride information—driver information and estimated time of arrival—with up to five contacts. “The technology is making the entire transportation experience safer as a whole,” she says.
But still, there’s cause for lingering concerns in the minds of passengers as the system matures. As Durkosh says, “No screening can be perfect because no background check can predict the future.”
( March 2016 )
