How often do you think this kind of thing happens with regular taxis? public transport?
My gut says it's extremely common, you just are not hearing about it.
My gut says it's extremely common, you just are not hearing about it.
It is still not material to the complaint. The complaint is that regulators are getting adequate and timely reporting from regular taxi companies so they can investigate. But not from Uber. This is leading to unnecessary safety issues for Uber riders.
Every sexual assault is horrific - but what if we look closer and discover that the rate of sexual assaults per ride from Uber is less than that from established cab services?
That completely inverts the situation and we would need to ask "What is Uber doing right, and how can the other services emulate their success?"
What if we discover they are about the same? Well, then Uber isn't anything exceptional and we have an industry-wide problem that needs addressing at all levels.
Either way, we don't even know where the real problem is if we don't start with those kinds of questions.
Second, the statistics do not support Uber being any safer:
"A search query for “sexual assault” within Uber’s customer support ticketing system yielded 6,160 results, or 6,160 cases, for the period between December 2012 and August 2015. Plugging in the search term “rape” resulted in 5,827 tickets, while “assault” revealed 3,524 and “sexually assaulted” yielded 382. In the same report, BuzzFeed obtained data from the company indicating that it had received “fewer than” 170 sexual assault claims and five claims of rape over the same time span.
In a response to the BuzzFeed article, Uber’s heads of communications, safety and global support attributed the thousands of results to misspellings of the word “rate,” words and names that contain the word “rape” and discussions of the issue by passengers who were not personally facing assault.
A January 2015 report by the libertarian Cato Institute found ride-sharing services provided by Uber and its main competitor, Lyft Inc., to be about as safe as taking a cab, which, for drivers, was not exactly reassuring."
http://www.ibtimes.com/uber-sexual-assault-statistics-ride-s...
*edited
> Uber failed to report a driver to the police, on the basis of sexual assault against a passenger - said driver then went on his way and just somehow found himself with another sexual assault complaint later on, against ANOTHER woman, while still as an Uber driver -- which is a grave failure on their part
and somehow magically find a systematic way of making it into
> What if.......... hear me out........ just wait....... what if Uber could be the good one here?? Let's ignore the bit about two women being sexually assulted for a second and run the statistics and find out!!!!!!
Here's my alternative position, which I hope you entertain as enthusiastically as you do statistics: Uber was wrong, and no amount of statistics about their dumbass business -- or any of those pathetic "aw dangut, but we're just a startup, doin' a disruption!!!" spiels -- negates people being assaulted, due to their gross, obvious negligence. End of story.
The victims contacted Uber with the assumption that Uber will carry out that responsibility. Uber failed to do so.
FWIW, Uber is not a Hackney carriage (black cab) operator (regulated since 1654). Only these are allowed to ply the streets for hire, and drivers have to pass "The Knowledge".
Uber operates as a minicab operator.
IMHO, a great deal of people here only car if the perpetrator is employed by Uber.
I can't even believe people are making excuses for Uber like this.
Perhaps I'm reading more into the comment than was intended, perhaps that is the correct amount.