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Comment by roymurdock | Hacker News Reader

problem with uber from a customer perspective is if you are a single woman taking a ride, the drivers are not full time cab employees that can possibly be fired/lose their cab medallion/permits. some women i know are considering switching to licensed cabs due to the harassment they get from uber drivers with no good mechanism to report and avoid those drivers aside from never traveling alone. as a guy, i've only had good experiences (except for the opaque surge pricing which always feels extortionate)

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> as a guy, i've only had good experiences (except for the opaque surge pricing which always feels extortionate)

Totally off the main topic here, but I'm also a guy and I've had one ride that was a little hair-raising. I wasn't harassed, mind.

I was riding with two girls (downtown Toronto) in an Uber and the driver was clearly on speed. He was extremely chatty, actually quite friendly, but very frantic. Took many last-second turns, wrong way down one-way streets and driving over curbs to get out of the way of cars on said one-way streets. It was nuts.

That said, all other rides I've had have been just fine. Often better than my experiences with Toronto cabs. There's no cash benefit for them taking the "scenic route" or "making wrong turns" which I've had less-scrupulous cabbies do to drive up the fare. That's a feature I appreciate. But I just make myself deal with transit since removing the app— their privacy measures didn't instill much confidence in me.

FWIW, in the market where I drove, it was very common for taxi drivers who were so bad they lost their taxi jobs (think about that) to just turn around and drive for Uber.

That's a thought that had never occurred to me. Seems like a massive oversight.

If the drivers are in any way even possibly breaking the law, then the riders could go to the police. If the drivers were acting in a completely lawful, but undesirable, way then the riders could give the drivers a low rating. It is very safe to assume that the servers of Uber (and all other ride sharing services) work to opaquely disconnect passengers and drivers when either party has given the other a low rating. It's a good and obvious idea on all levels, including even just optimizing for max profit.

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