Marble Falls       When I’m not at homebase, I try to call at 7AM sharp to mi companera, no matter where I am in the world.  I wasn’t surprised that today’s call tracked the story in the Times about persistent and epidemic sexual assault for women riders using the rideshare company, Uber.  She was outraged, as we all should be.

Sexual assault is a huge issue in the United States, and we’re not taking it seriously, which also means, like in the case of Uber, we’re not doing what we can and should do to stop it.  Like a recurring nightmare, as we’ve discussed recently, the article notes that “there is no centralized database for incidents of sexual violence, according to a Government Accountability Office report from last year.”  All of which allows these attacks, largely against women, whether in their homes or riding with Uber or Lyft, to spread epidemically.  The Trump administration doesn’t like anyone to pay attention to numbers, as we know, and if you add that reticence to the fact that they are more committed to protect the police than stopping crime, we can’t expect a federal solution anytime soon, so we have to push for more cooperation from cities and states.

The book on Uber seems to be one bad chapter after another.  They get a complaint of sexual assault every eight minutes. “From 2017 to 2022, a total of 400,181 Uber trips resulted in reports of sexual assault and sexual misconduct in the United States, court documents show. Previously, the company had disclosed 12,522 accounts of serious sexual assaults for that same time period.”  There’s no way to claim that’s a simple rounding error.  More recent statistics have not been disclosed, but there are indications that with the number of rides having increased, so have the incidents of assault.  There’s no reason to believe that Lyft is any different.  They claim problems are hardly 1% of their rides.  These companies are hoping math is no friend to Americans, and they are probably not wrong, but this one is simple and anyone can do it in their heads.  For every million rides, that means 100,000 sexual assaults, and they handle many millions of rides a year in the US.  They spin that only 15% of the complains move from general sexual harassment offenses, which they see as run-of-the-mill to full assault, which is criminal. Math is still not their friend.  Based on Uber’s earlier reports, that would mean 60,000 full-on assaults.

To go with the “ewww” in Uber, there’s an “oh no” as well.  The company has done the research and conducted the experiments with its app to reduce this problem, but has either been unwilling or hesitant to take the necessary steps that they know will work.  A big reason is their commitment to maintaining the fiction in their business model that their drivers are not employees, so they chose money over safety for their women passengers.  Their driver monitoring system can track rides and call both drivers and passengers when they go “off route,” so they actually know when an assault may be happening.  When no one answers, they don’t call the police, they just suspend the driver.  How callous and lame is that?  Mandating cameras, pairing women passengers with women drivers, and other fixes, some of which they have implemented in other countries, they have avoided in the US as well.

These companies are inundated with lawsuits and are aggressively attacking the plaintiffs.  Maybe some of these suits and bad publicity will force them to pay and mend some of their ways, but, frankly, it’s doubtful that will change their calculation on money versus passenger safety.

A bitter irony is that part of their public relations spin for not doing much to prevent sexual assault lies in their willingness to hide behind the fact that this is a societal problem across the country.  Indeed, that’s without question, although their argument is the same as gun manufacturers make when claiming innocence at killings, or killers and Iowa senators saying “people are going to die anyway,” so who cares.  Rather than calling these companies for a ride, we need to call them out for taking all of us for a ride, many at our peril.