Uber, which plans to move 3,000 employees to Dallas in the coming years, says it will increase safety measures and create a partnership with RapidSOS, a company that will monitor a GPS-based emergency button built right into the Uber app that will alert local police of any incident. They underscore what has always sounded like a fatal flaw in the company’s–and its many copy cats–business model: much of their competitive advantage against taxi services is based on undercutting labor laws and circumventing industry safety standards. These safety concerns are exactly what have dogged the company’s expansion into London, where authorities found that some 14,000 Uber trips were taken with drivers who had faked their identification to log into the app. Tell that to the 464 people who were raped, or the thousands of other riders (and some drivers) who were subjected to “non-consensual kissing, non-consensual touching and attempted rape.” In its report, the company attempts to contextualize the statistics, comparing them to national averages and citing the fact that 99.9 percent of Uber rides during the period studied went without incident. Forget about unsustainable business models, that is simply not acceptable. For a company that has reinvented how people move about their day-to-day lives, a company whose name has become a verb synonymous with the entire ride-share industry, it is strange that so much doubt shadows their future prospects.īut perhaps nothing facing Uber’s ability to compete is as damning as the new safety report that documents nearly 6,000 incidents of sexual assault between 20, including 464 rapes and 19 deaths in Uber rides. In some markets where they have expanded successfully, like London, local officials have sought to ban them over safety concerns.
They have been out-competed in valuable expansion markets. Their business model has been ripped apart.
Uber–the company that recently received a record $24 million in incentives to move some of its corporate offices into Deep Ellum–is a controversy magnet.
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