Uber Safety Issues
Uber sent out an email this week detailing a new feature that’s supposed to enhance safety. Now, you can report non-urgent safety issues that occur during a ride after your trip and a member of their “Safety Team” will reach out for support “shortly” after the trip. Yes I highlighted certain words for a reason. If you feel unsafe you can let them know after the danger has passed what went wrong when they reach out to you. Does anyone else see how absurd that is? I had my own personal nightmare in a foreign country, on a deserted highway with a driver that changed my perspective on using ride sharing while traveling alone (in certain circumstances). I can assure you that the safety team was absolutely no help at all. Mark’s wife also had a safety issue during a trip last year to Puerto Rico.
How This Feature Works
For non emergency safety issues, you tap the blue shield in the bottom right corner to open the Safety Toolkit, select “Report Safety Issue” and fill in the form with details to get support from the Safety Team after your trip.
For emergency situations
If however, you face an urgent safety issue, use the in-app emergency button. Tap 911 Assistance from the Safety Toolkit to connect with emergency support. The app will display your live location and vehicle information for you to relay to the dispatcher. Today, it is available in more than 60 cities and counties in the US, and we recently began testing the feature in Mexico. Hopefully they are able to expand this service into every city and country where Uber is available.
Thoughts- Uber Safety Issues
While it’s clear that Uber can’t control everything their drivers do and no amount of vetting can eliminate all safety risks they need to do more. There have been too many issues with respect to the safety precautions taken by Uber and too many people I know personally have had scary situations. If Uber’s safety response team were trained properly and their safety enhancements were actual enhancements, I would appreciate new features like this. It seems like this is just another route for people to file driver complaints.
But this feature seems to just be a PR response to a very real issue that needs to be effectively addressed. Last year, Shawn wrote about a new feature that actually does seem to help certain safety issues called “RideCheck”.
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This is a bad take by you. Of course there’s value in this. This can help FUTURE riders by taking a potentially dangerous driver off the road if Uber sees enough complaints relating to them.
Her justifiable point is that that doesn’t do anything for the person currently in danger. Uber just needs to set up a real time system. Otherwise it’s like offering cheering news to someone that while their family may have just died in a plane crash, future people might be saved as a result of lessons learned.
Yup, That was my point exactly. 🙂
I’m certainly glad about that- But I find it hard to believe that anybody who had a safety issue didn’t report it before so I don’t know what or how the system has changed since I had to call safety.