One of my biggest fears while cycling in the city is uber. Drivers frequently pull to the curb aggressively without signal, often blocking bike lanes. Unlike a taxi there are few markings to alert cyclists that the car will show this behavior. At best you might spot an airport rideshare pass in the back window, but these are often placed in the corner of the drivers side, making them hard to see from the edge of the road.
Literally every day on my bike ride to 4th and king Caltrain, as I pull up to the intersection, a Lyft or Uber waiting at the stoplight will pop a right side door on me as a completely unaware passenger tries to hop out.
I feel bad for the driver cause it's not like they can make the passenger wait for the red light so they can pull up to the actual drop off point, so I usually skid to a stop right next to the door shouting my head off in a "panic" to give everyone a good morning wake up call.
One of the selling points of Uber in their marketing, at least in chicago, was that Uber drivers would drive like “regular” people and not like cabbies; because cabbies in Chicago drive like crazy people. In a very short period of time Uber drivers all drive exactly like cabbies, which is obnoxious since there’s more of them.
I live in Chi too and frequently lyft. They need to make it easier to report bad driving. That would solve the problem. I submit tickets when the driver drives like a madman but it’s not clear what to do about it inside the app.
> I live in Chi too and frequently lyft. They need to make it easier to report bad driving. That would solve the problem.
It needs to be possible for non-customers to report bad driving. Uber and Lyft passengers are not incentivized to report bad behavior by their drivers because that behavior often benefits them (stop wherever the passenger likes, shave a few minutes off by veering through traffic, block or drive in bus lanes because it's more convenient or faster).
That's my biggest complaint about these taxi (they're not "sharing" shit) services: there's no enforcement structure against them and no way for people who aren't customers to push back on terrible actors. Uber and Lyft have disclaimed all responsibility because "drivers are not our employees" and they use the myth of "sharing" to get around laws around many things, but especially around receiving complaints.
Given that Uber/Lyft track every inch of the car's journey, it seems entirely feasible for them to automatically catch some types of bad driving (exceeding speed limits, illegal U-turns, frequent hard braking, etc). But currently they're not incentivized to.
Well then obviously for some reason "crazy" driving is selected for. The exhaustive options are:
1) profits are optimized by driving slightly faster and slightly more recklessly.
2) with hours and hours of experience you can drive better than an average person. Our simple non-professional minds simply don't comprehend their driving style and interpret their decisions as crazy.
NY's regulations help a lot in this regard. While Uber's don't have vehicle specific markings, they do have specially marked license plates that I can use to predict their behavior.
