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Comment by bigethan | Hacker News Reader

As a cyclist in SF, Uber/Lyft drivers are the most dangerous thing going. They're driving by staring at their phone's map for directions and pickup/dropoff. Once they stop, they stare at their phone for the next ride. Very little situational awareness.

It'd be nice if there was some sort of way for them to indicate they drive erratically. Perhaps by painting their cars all yellow or something...

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Whether I am running or driving if I see a driver making dangerous u-turns or 3-point turns as of late it is always an Uber driver.

I always joke on a run it's normal to almost be hit by cars multiple time and typically it is by the same Uber driver. Just last night I am running thru a crosswalk (w/signal) and a car makes a left into the crosswalk almost hitting the first time, this street has no sidewalk so I am running behind the Uber driver who comes to a stop in the middle of the road for a good 45 seconds, as I proceed to catch up to the stopped car and pass it begins to do an unsignaled 3 point turn almost hitting me the 2nd time (this is when I see a phone in the drivers face), and for good measure the driver makes sure to nearly hit me reversing to clear the turn.

I have noticed some drivers have a glowing U on the dash but ride sharing drivers should be forced to have those old school pizza delivery light on the roof the they can be avoided, especially when they come to a full stop in the middle of traffic.

Or maybe we could give drivers tickets for that kinda stuff instead of almost exclusively giving tickets for speeding which I especially on the freeway believe to be a comparatively small problem.

High speed collisions are a significant source of fatalities, so I wouldn't characterize speeding as a small problem.

High speed != speeding. Of course a collision at 70 or 80mph will have more fatalities on average than a collision at a "city" speed, but I would argue that safe driving in the city should be our priority, not catching people doing 90 on an 80 mph road.

Also, there tend to be far more pedestrians and cyclists in a city who are far more vulnerable even in a low-speed accident than one between two cars.

Hidden cost of Uber on cities/residents. Now we need more police to follow Uber drivers around continuously.

It's also a bit worrisome that the driver apps only give the driver ~30 seconds to accept a new ride request. The requests almost always come in while they are driving.

Drivers are forced to pay attention to their phone and try to figure out if they want to accept the ride, all while driving. It's incredibly distracting and they never have enough time to pull over and safely accept the request.

This puts the driver as well as everyone else on the road at risk for no reason other than some arbitrary response time for ride requests.

Well the arbitrary response time is driven by users requesting rides. If Uber takes that long to match me with a driver, I assume the app is busted and I switch to Lyft.

That doesn't mean it isn't dangerous.

Sounds like there is need for some regulation here, because the risks of fast response time to customer are externalized to other people in traffic.

There could be a law that a driver must have at least one full minute to accept a request. That would help this problem, even if one minute is still a short time to pull over and respond.

Instead of building regulations around internet services to discourage bad driving, why not just enforce laws on bad driving directly? If a driver is not paying attention while driving, punish them.

Suppose my livelihood depends on using my phone while driving (which entails all of the distraction, etc. described, and sometimes results in poor driving on my part). I wonder how much enforcement would be required before I would stop using my phone while driving (and incur the requisite loss of income).

Right now enforcement is at, what, 1/1000 rides (to pick an arbitrary number)? If it was 10/1000 would it influence my behavior? I imagine that 10X or even more enforcement would be required, which may not be practicable.

The expectations of the users are supposed to be managed by the creators of the apps. Right now, in my opinion, they are making an unacceptably dangerous compromise in driver safety for a very minor increase in customer convenience.

And is likely illegal in many places where using one's phone while driving is illegal. While this wasn't mentioned in Mr Y Aslam, Mr J Farrar and Others -V- Uber (the recent ruling about worker status in England & Wales), it does further add to the argument that drivers are not able to accept or decline rides at will, as if they are driving they are unable to legally decline them.

Completely agree, but it's not only Uber. As a motorcyclist in UK in a city without Uber I can tell you I know what you're talking about. Taxi drivers and bus drivers use phones to track times, number of passengers inside, taxi drivers use Google Maps. Easily 90% of dangerous situations I had was with drivers using phones/tables while driving. A lot of normal people who use phones try to "hide it" and place their phones on their legs while driving, so the phone is not... emmm visible to others, but everyone can tell that a driver looking down on their legs while driving is paying more attention to their facebook feed than to a road.

My one and only experience using Uber was with a driver who had no clue where anything was, clearly wasn't from around the place, and from what I could tell violated two traffic laws.

So what do I do, give him a bad rating? No, because this person probably needed the money, and a rating under 4.5 gets you shitcanned in an already rigged system.

Quite the revolution indeed.

Isn't that the point of the rating system? I don't want to be killed by my next Uber ride because you feel bad rating them appropriately.

I've never had a bad Uber experience but I have had some downright frightening cab rides and I'd love to be able to rate that.

Yes, except it's not really a fair system. A 4.5/5.0, to me, is an excellent score. That's an A- if it were a grade on a math test. Yet in Uber, a 4.5 means you get your driving privileges revoked. How does that make sense? It isn't a system in which I can fairly and accurately vote someone's work.

Continuing the test analogy, I don't want to eat at a restaurant that got rated a B by the health department. There are many cases where not being good enough to get an A- means you aren't good enough to do it professionally. This is no different.

It depends on what the score represents. If a 4.4 means you take a wrong turn here and there then I don't mind. If it means they constantly speed but other users don't care then I do mind.

> Yet in Uber, a 4.5 means you get your driving privileges revoked.

If that is unreasonable, why is that the system? If I can have nothing but 4.6+ drivers then why wouldn't I want that? If Uber doesn't have enough over 4.6 drivers, wouldn't they simply lower their standards? I can only assume that isn't a problem.

I feel the same happens with Airbnb. All ratings are between 4.5 and 5. I think people feel that they have to give good ratings as they feel the 'know' the host and want to be kind. As a result the ratings are kinda useless. I try to be honest, but don't like to be the outlier either...

Agreed. I've given an Uber driver a 1 rating after he jumped a red light and almost hit a cyclist.

If someone drives badly they need a different career and rating them highly regardless just makes sure the feedback system doesn't work.

Oh well, as long as you get a cheap ride, who cares if the asshole can't drive and doesn't care about other road users.

A bus ride is cheap. A 20 dollar fare to go 10 miles is expensive.

Very. Uber competes with public transit on availability, speed, and door-to-door service - not on price.

An uber ride is cheaper than a taxi.

You got downvoted but I somewhat agree with you. I almost never give less than 5 stars unless I think the driver is really endangering people out there.

In any other situation in the world when someone is rude to you as a customer you just shrug it off, maybe you tell your friend "The guy at the shoe store was so mean today". And I know at all of our jobs we have some days where we just half-ass things or are short with people. But suddenly in the "sharing economy" I get to constantly vote whether or not people should keep their jobs. It just seems so unfair to me, like I'm the emperor in Gladiator or something. I would hate to give someone 2 stars, they lose the gig, and now can't make rent or something.

If your driver violated two traffic laws, you should most definitely rate them poorly. They're a hazard for everyone on the road and should reconsider their line of work. No one is entitled to any job, especially a job that can very easily kill other people. There's a reason why many work vehicles have "how's my driving?" stickers on the back.

Those kinda amuse me. Unless you got a passenger the act of taking down all those numbers is very distracting.

Quite the revolution indeed.

This is the sort of fastidiousness that Krugman talks about in this article[1]. In the old system, that person would probably not have the job in the first place, since the number of drivers was a fraction of what they are today, but since you are now personally forced to deal with the precariousness of their situation, suddenly the situation is disagreeable.

[1] http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/smokey.html

I took an Uber ride where the driver was totally unbelievable, couldn't be more distracted. Swerving while changing Pandora stations, accepting phone calls, diddling with his phone, diddling with every damn control in the car, and ran a red light. It amazes me there's people who not only believe it's acceptable to do this at all but acceptable to so this with paying customers in your car.

I didn't complain though. Why? I had already complained about another driver who was going 50 MPH down a narrow city street as well as being super rude and taking a ridiculously long route way out of the way. So I didn't want to look like a complainer or make it look like I was trying to get a free ride (they refunded my ride when I complained about the other driver).

What would be cool is using the windscreen for an AR display, with glasses for both head tracking and for stereoscopic display.

I guess it would be expensive, probably too expensive for Uber drivers. Maybe it could still be used in luxury vehicles while full autonomous operation is in the works.

While not AR, Mazda is moving in that direction with their HUD. They display speed, directions from the NAV and speed limit from sign recognition. All on the screen in the CX-9 (or is it 7?) and a little popup display in the 6.

A HUD would probably be almost as good as AR in terms of safety, just not nearly as cool.

As a cyclist in SF, have you encountered any self driving cars? Were they aware of your presence on the road and able to maneuver around you?

The google prototype car does an impressive job of bike/ped detection at 12m30s into this video:

https://youtu.be/tiwVMrTLUWg?t=12m30s

In Melbourne I've had Uber driver's actually point out other Uber drivers by their erratic U-turns and swerving, bizarre!

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