What we can ask, however, is why isn't there a worldwide " I need help" button? Doesn't matter what your problem is, of what variety, you need help. The driver could have rang that, either of the women could have. Instead, one of the three people are dead. Oh well.

I don't understand. What would such a button have done?

If somebody needed help, the driver may very well have to decided to stop ASAP, at the same gore point, and the women could have then chosen to immediately get out, and one of them would have gotten killed. Literally nothing would have changed.

Indeed, it sounds like one of the women was shouting there was an emergency, so the driver stopped. That is effectively "I need help". What would your button do any differently?

I’m not at all trying to downplay Uber’s responsibly here, I also am not pretending the driver is not at fault, however everyone seems to want to put the full/majority of the blame on the driver while reserving a bit for Uber as well. This whole subthread posits that self-driving cars would solve this (I find that laughable).

My point is: where do we draw the line? Intoxicated people are going to act irrationally and at what point does “low paid person who shuttles people from point A to point B” become responsible for the actions of their riders?

It’s still unclear how much of this was “forced out of the car” and “got out to argue and refused to get back in”, the timeline of events is incredibly muddy (as the linked PDF agrees) and having dealt with very intoxicated people I can easily imagine the challenges the driver (who doesn’t appear to speak English well or at all given they needed a translator in the arbitration) faced dealing with 2 drunk and irrational passengers.

Let me be crystal clear, I don’t at all think “oh well, someone died”. But attacking the driver isn’t going to fix the system that caused this.