Remix.run Logo
Spooky23 5 hours ago

From the article: “Uber has said it is one of the safest ways to get around, with the vast majority of its trips in the United States — 99.9 percent — occurring without an incident of any kind”

The best way to reduce your incident count is by not collecting incident data.

There’s a whole weird underground economy around uber. The guys I get in my area in Upstate NY are often migrating up from NYC. They are like a cloud labor force and follow the rates around. It’s cool in some ways, as the friction of getting a job makes it hard to move, but that type of arrangement is a great operating environment for predators.

gruez 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>>The only way I’ve found to contact a human when a ride goes awry is to basically say an accident happened. That connects you with humans who can actually, sometimes, address your problem in a way the chatbot never can.

>The best way to reduce your incident count is by not collecting incident data.

The guy you're replying to is actually claiming the opposite, ie. that rude drivers complaints are getting upgraded to "accident" or "driver was threatening" complaints to get past the chatbot, and Uber is actually safer than their statistics claim.

JumpCrisscross 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> and Uber is actually safer than their statistics claim

I’m not sure I’m reaching that conclusion. (Possibly because I don’t want to.)

I was once in an accident due to a New York cabbie being on their phone. Blew through a stop sign and got T-boned. When I’m in a car with a distracted driver, now, I tend to report it after the trip.

Uber sometimes lets me do this. And sometimes it does not. When it does not, when I escalate to a safety issue (Uber will sometimes call the sheriff before putting anyone on the thread, they’re that cheap and dismissive), I am making the record reflect louder than a chat with support would. But the underlying jeopardy is both real and unchanged.

So are Uber rides safer than the figures reflect? Or was their lack of safety controls previously mollified by customer service? I’m not drawing a conclusion on that delineation. Just pointing out the effect.

YokoZar 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> From the article: “Uber has said it is one of the safest ways to get around, with the vast majority of its trips in the United States — 99.9 percent — occurring without an incident of any kind”

Another way of phrasing this is that if you take Uber to and from work, you'll likely have an incident within 2 years.

pixl97 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I would like to know what incident entails too. Knowing the very minor things that would also happen to you while driving would really narrow down if Uber is a murder wagon or if it's about the same as driving yourself.