The poor little highly-valued and often-misunderstood ride-sharing giant just can t catch a break.
Another day, another blogosphere full of bad, sad and troubling news for the San Francisco-based startup that more and more people seem to love to hate.
First, we take you to Chicago, where city officials are being very passive-aggressive against Uber, reaching out a helping hand to the poor little beleaguered but politically connected taxi industry that says Uber is taking its drivers to the cleaners.
CHICAGO PLANS APP SO TAXIS CAN COMPETE WITH UBER, RIDESHARING SERVICES, reads the headline in Reuters:
Chicago opened a new front in the war on ridesharing services like Uber on Wednesday, approving a plan to sponsor an app for riders to hail local cabs.
The measure was part of a package including financial supports for taxis, such as fee breaks, passed by the city council on Wednesday.
A union that has expanded into cab drivers and organized Chicago this year pushed hard for the package, which had the support of Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
We have found a way to level the playing field, between cabs and ridesharing services, said City Councilman Emma Mitts, a co-sponsor of the ordinance.
Taxi drivers from here to Timbuktu are up in arms about Uber, claiming its social-media ways pose an existential threat to their heavily regulated industry, thus putting cabbies at an unfair disadvantage on the streets.
Meanwhile, over in India where an Uber driver was arrested recently for allegedly raping a passenger, the ride-share company was obliged to offer a very public mea culpa and promised to clean up its act. Oh yeah: they ll also suspend all operations in Delhi while the company reviews its services in India.
, this news follows the arrest of an Uber driver in the city who is accused of raping a female passenger. In response the Delhi authorities banned all net-based taxi services.
Uber apologized for what happened and acknowledged that it must do better .
It will conduct a full audit of the way it screens drivers.
We are sorry and deeply saddened by what happened over the weekend in New Delhi. Our hearts go out to the victim of this horrible crime. We have been [doing] and will continue to do everything in our power to assist the authorities to help bring the perpetrator to justice, Uber India said in a statement.
And these two stories come in the same week that prosecutors in San Francisco and Los Angeles sued Uber for making bogus claims about the background checks it gives its drivers and for charging its customers fraudulent fees. Double ouch!
But in a bit of a silver lining, Uber got some encouraging news on Thursday when a driving-based analytical startup called Zendrive released findings of a study it did the past few months in San Francisco to see how safe the drivers, both professional and the folks at Uber et al., really were. The ride-sharing drivers, it turns out, got higher marks in the please-me-don t-crash-and-kill-me department.
Today, Zendrive is releasing the findings of a study that it conducted for several months, starting this summer. We studied over 1000 professional and non-professional drivers in San Francisco in an effort to determine how safety they drive. We used secret passengers to take trips in rideshares and taxis around San Francisco and to analyze the behavior of the drivers. At the same time we also analyzed the driving habits of everyday non-professional drivers.
We found that: while rideshare drivers are given a lot of flack when it comes to safety, taxis are the least safe option when it comes to using a car to get around San Francisco.
Zendrive s technology uses the sensors on a driver s phone to measure driving behaviors like speeding, hard stops, and cell phone use. For rideshare and taxi drivers, secret passengers had a modified version of the technology on their own phones, which let them manually log the driver s phone use while driving.
Specifically:
1) While we know that everybody speeds, what was striking in the data was how much more likely taxis are to speed than rideshare. Speeding contributes to 31% of traffic fatalities. Overall, taxis are 46% more likely to speed than rideshare and 18% more likely than the average driver. This is worse during peak hours, when taxis are about 2.5 times as likely to speed as rideshare.
Oh, those poor cabbies. Now it s the hacks who can t seem to catch a break.
Good luck, everybody, getting around town.
Credit: businessinsider.com