
CNN investigation: 103 Uber drivers accused of sexual assault or abuse - darkkknight
http://money.cnn.com/2018/04/30/technology/uber-driver-sexual-assault/index.html
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taxicabjesus
Someone filed a complaint with the taxi company about me once... The safety
manager read it to me: 'passenger states driver was hitting on her daughter'.

... I asked for the location of the pickup, and remembered her. The
complaining passenger was distressed when I arrived at the address. Her
'friend' had thrown all her stuff out of the car (before I arrived on scene).
The passenger's daughter's birthday cupcakes were 'ruined'. We first went to
get the daughter a short distance away.

Mom wanted daughter to get in the cab. Daughter protested that it was her
birthday, that she was having a good time and wanted to stay.

Eventually mom won the argument. Daughter got in the front passenger seat, as
if to say "fine I'll come but I'm not sitting back there with _you._ "

I chatted with the daughter to hopefully take her mind off her mom ruining her
birthday celebration. At the end of the ride I was going to ask something,
then reconsidered as that would be crossing the line into 'creepy taxi driver'
territory.

After hearing my version of the story, the safety manager told how the person
who took the complaint had commented that if I was actually a problem, 'mom'
would probably have called sooner than 3 days after the ride.

The company safety manager had stories of his own about how his efforts to be
helpful were misinterpreted...

He also told of another driver who had some unaccompanied pre-teen girls. They
wouldn't stop playing with the power windows, so he disabled their button,
which greatly irritated the girls. When they got home, they told their mother
that their driver had touched them. Mom called the police, who investigated...
the taxi company consulted the cab's GPS logs, which were suspicious on
account of the driver stopping his meter some time post-trip in the car
wash... The driver was sweating bullets for a few weeks. The girls eventually
confessed they'd made up their story...

There are certainly women who have problems with their drivers, but slander is
a problem for the drivers too.

------
tenken
A key fact left out of the reporting is how many Uber drivers does Uber employ
in the USA ... ?

So it's 103 drivers out of what? 100,000 driver employees? Is this above or
below the nation average. And what incompetencies if any is Uber responsible
for.

~~~
jessriedel
Business insider says 327k drivers were active in the month of Sept 2015

[http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-doubles-its-drivers-
in-2...](http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-doubles-its-drivers-
in-2015-2015-10)

and WSJ says there were at least 160k by Jan 2015.

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/uber-touts-its-employment-
oppor...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/uber-touts-its-employment-
opportunities-1422229862) [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-t...](http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-says-its-profitable-in-the-
us-2016-4)

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
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
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.

