When one travels, one frequently sees signs in airport arrivals halls: do not accept lifts from unlicensed / unmarked vehicles, as it is not safe. Use a licensed, vetted taxi service.
Uber's entire business model is, essentially, supplying unlicensed taxi services. I am honestly surprised it works as well as it does.
The thing is the Uber/Lyft model identifies both people. That makes it much, much safer than you would have from simply an unlicensed taxi. And note the problem applies across the transportation industry, this isn't Uber-specific.
If anything, I would feel safer in an Uber than a taxi because there's a clear record of who is in that car.
Uber actively works against police trying to investigate these incidents, in ways that are almost actively malicious. They require warrants - not simply police inquiries, nor customer consent, but warrants issued by a judge, yo turn over any data, even the identity of the driver. They purposely delete this data on an accelerated basis so that they can say "We don't know" - doing dirty tricks like making receipts that don't include enough information to identify drivers (and intentionally obfuscate). They have ordered and made it both official and unofficial policy for their agents to stall police inquiries until they hit those data deletion dates.
At some level, they are attempting to avoid bad press, but their methods go far beyond "Washing our hands of it, not my problem" and into "Trying to obfuscate and cover up crimes so that we can't be tied to them".
Source: Worked at Uber for about six months and quit in disgust.
None of this is to exonerate the NYT for their biased reporting, because the crime rates in conventional taxes are almost as bad, and closure rates are worse. It's an ugly industry that Uber could have cleaned up but decided the pragmatic approach was to spin doctor.
The NYT is moving more and more into scaremongering articles. This is a great example where the title says "Sexual Assault" but within the article it mentions the vast majority are nothing near as serious as assault (but obviously still a problem).
The article does not compare or contrast the rates to other industries, situations or just living life in general. My comment is not to absolve Uber, but rather point out that the article does not do a good job at proving that Uber is any more dangerous than a variety of other places/activities/things.
This is not new; NYT has been doing this for quite a long time, and it got exacerbated when Trump started running for office in 2015-2016. It is very difficult for me to take NYT (or most news websites) seriously now - one can take advantage of a lot of platforms just stripping out most fluff and giving you only the objective details.
Just take a cursory look at the front page, and see how much of it is hard, actual news. Even in the Business section, you'll find words like "cult-like" and "drowning in debt". It's very difficult to believe that this is a newspaper of record.
Uber's entire business model is, essentially, supplying unlicensed taxi services. I am honestly surprised it works as well as it does.
If anything, I would feel safer in an Uber than a taxi because there's a clear record of who is in that car.
At some level, they are attempting to avoid bad press, but their methods go far beyond "Washing our hands of it, not my problem" and into "Trying to obfuscate and cover up crimes so that we can't be tied to them".
Source: Worked at Uber for about six months and quit in disgust.
None of this is to exonerate the NYT for their biased reporting, because the crime rates in conventional taxes are almost as bad, and closure rates are worse. It's an ugly industry that Uber could have cleaned up but decided the pragmatic approach was to spin doctor.
Uber is certainly not capable of dishing out the kind of punishment these scumbags deserve, nor is it capable of providing due process to defendants.
The article does not compare or contrast the rates to other industries, situations or just living life in general. My comment is not to absolve Uber, but rather point out that the article does not do a good job at proving that Uber is any more dangerous than a variety of other places/activities/things.
Just take a cursory look at the front page, and see how much of it is hard, actual news. Even in the Business section, you'll find words like "cult-like" and "drowning in debt". It's very difficult to believe that this is a newspaper of record.