L.A. News Piece on Uber Highlights Its Dangers, Which Appear to Be the Same as Taking Taxis

When you call a ride-sharing
service, you’re accepting a ride from a stranger! Oh, sure, you can
say the same when call a cab or even ride a bus, but the NBC
affiliate in Los Angeles wants us to see this is as something
different or sinister somehow. Last night,
it aired “Risky Ride: Who’s Behind the Wheels of Uber Cars?”
The piece aims to terrify us all with the idea that these strangers
may have criminal backgrounds and questions the thoroughness of the
company’s background checks.

To illustrate the problem, they got Beverly Locke to apply to
become an UberX driver. Locke is an ex-con with a “20-year rap
sheet [that] includes burglary, cocaine possession, and making
criminal threats with the intent to cause death or bodily injury.”
She says she’s reformed now and wants to “make up for her past.”
She passed the background check and was hired as a driver. NBC
filmed her getting her first call for a pickup but then had the
passenger cancel, as if after getting Locke’s participation and
filming her they thought she’d just beat up or rob the guy
anyway.

NBC highlights a couple of recent cases of Uber driver problems,
including the San Francisco driver arrested on New Year’s Eve in
San Francisco for hitting and killing a girl. He had a previous
conviction for reckless driving. Another driver arrested for
assaulting a passenger had a 2012 DUI conviction.

NBC also tracked down a local couple that had a very bad
experience with an UberX driver. He brought them home from an
airport, dumped their luggage and then raced off with the couple’s
briefcase, purse, iPad and wallet in the back. When they contacted
him (on Uber you can directly get back in touch with your driver),
he apparently refused to return their stuff and that he was not
responsible for items left in their car.

Without defending Uber, doesn’t this sound like a familiar
experience for anybody who has left anything behind in a taxi? NBC
notes that when the couple contacted Uber, the response was that
the drivers were not Uber employees but private contractors. This
is treated like an important critical problem. But the Uber
response also says that they’re “deactivating” the driver and
keeping him from accepting more passengers and said they’ll
cooperate with police. The NBC report ignores this part of Uber’s
response (I had to freeze-frame the television report to read the
e-mail shown), which is pretty shady.

It’s obvious that the point of the NBC expose is to suggest that
cab drivers, with their heavily regulated system and
fingerprinting, are safer, and so Uber passengers are taking on
additional safety risks in exchange for saving a few dollars on a
trip. Regulation saves us! But a Google check will find instances
of the exact
same
problems with “licensed” taxi services. In January, Pando.com
did take a look at some of
Uber’s problems with background checks and attempts to figure
out how Uber might be missing crimes it should be catching (answer:
it depends on the quality of the background checks).

As Uber is getting more attention, it’s getting more criticism.
Arguably that’s a good thing. Uber providing a valuable service
customers want doesn’t make it a saint, and sometimes its response
to competition can be as
problematic as those of the entrenched taxi companies. NBC

also notes that Uber is far from the only ride-sharing service
out there. If Uber does not do a good job at protecting the safety
and property of its customers, then competitors, including
traditional cab services, will be able to push them out of the
market. This is true regardless of how much regulation local
governments push on them.