This Week: Separate Bathrooms for Uber Drivers & Employees? And More

This week in rideshare news: An Uber Greenlight Hub has separate bathrooms for drivers and Uber employees, Uber launches a payday loan service, and Uber releases a safety report.

Hey, what’s up? It’s Cecily. It’s a rainy afternoon. Do you guys know the song? Anyway, we’re about to get into the news over here I got my set up pop in. Let’s go ahead and get into it. It’s this week in RideShare news.

Uber had separate bathrooms for employees and driver partners

Critics are coming after Uber after exposing inferior bathroom accommodations for driver partners. Okay. This is pretty intense. It’s a real story. It’s not a joke. An Uber driver in Rhode Island snapped this photo from a Greenlight Hub in Providence, Rhode Island. As you can see there are definitely two bathrooms. One is labeled for employees and the other is labeled for driver partners. I wish they would’ve got what it looked like inside, but this is what we have to work with.

But another driver here in Los Angeles said that they were scolded and shamed for trying to use an employee port-a-potty at a Greenlight Hub. If you look at the picture, you can see that there are clearly two different types of port-a-potties for drivers and employees and from what I see in the pictures that the employee port-a-potty looks a little bit nicer.

Since its inception Uber has had an issue with classifying drivers and looking at these photos, I still feel like they have an issue with that. They’re not far off. Why in the heck are we segmenting bathrooms for partners and employees in the first place? This feels like classism to me and it needs to stop. Based off of this article where I got this information from, this is a practice that’s held all over the country at Greenlight Hubs. Apparently Uber is just now finding out about that. They released a statement said that all facilities for drivers and employees, including bathrooms should be held to the same standards of quality regardless of whether they’re shared and that they’re sorry for missing this and that they all address it immediately. Well, it does need to be addressed and it’s not cool. It’s not okay and frankly it needs to be stopped.

So when I log into Uber this week, I couldn’t believe my eyes. This was an actual ride that popped up on my phone. Uber will finally let drivers see where passengers are going and offer a pay estimate before you accept the ride. Now it’s about time for this. I know Caviar does this, DoorDash does this. This is why I prefer those. It should have happened sooner if you ask me, but I think that this is handy information and I think that this is going to get people excited about driving because you know where you’re going.

How have your acceptance rates been this week having access to the destination before you accept your trip? I want to know honestly, have your acceptance rates gone down? I mean as it allowed you to navigate the city better. Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Uber Payday loans

So currently Uber is testing a payday loan program for Uber drivers. The program offers a short term credit for $500 and the debt is paid off when you drive for Uber. So while the program is built to help drivers with financial issues and that sort of thing, critics are going in and they say this program has the potential to trap drivers into a cycle of debt and longer hours behind the wheel to make ends meat and to pay off their loans. These critics also state that the program has a potential to forcibly retain drivers and to control them, which is completely opposite than the whole independent driving platform that they love to advertise so much. Because Uber controls your access to the platform, the number of rides sent to you, et cetera, et cetera.

Now details of the program have not been released yet, but we do know that it’s being tested right now in India, Peru and Brazil, and due to a poll sent out in September of this past year, it seems like it might be coming to the US very soon.

What we know about payday loans for a lot of people, they can be predatory. Most of the people end up getting loans are people who cannot afford to pay them back. It’s really hard to make $500 on Uber on top of making the money you would need to survive while you’re paying your loan back. And so I don’t know, without knowing the terms of paying it back, it seems like to me that it would take a long time to do so. And to make money to live and to have money for fuel and things like that. So it’s probably too soon for me to sit here and say how I feel about the program just yet. But it just … Maybe if the amounts were smaller and you could pay them off in a time that was comfortable to you maybe, but it just seems like potential for disaster. Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Uber US Safety Report

Uber released their safety report yesterday and Harry went in depth about the report. You can find that link to his video here. One thing I found significant that I wanted to share with you is that the part that the media is having a field day with. They’re reporting that the company has been transparent and sharing the number of sexual assaults this past year. They said that more than 3045 people were assaulted in rides and they are also saying that the ratio between assaulted drivers and riders is almost 50-50 didn’t know that. Huh. So to bring things in perspective. They’re also saying that over 99.9 rides are safe because they estimate that there are at least 2.3 billion rides every year, so of course we want that number to be zero, but also bring into perspective that there are 2.3 billion rides every single year.

A lot of media and news organizations are not adding that piece because they’d like to sensationalize, they thrive off of people being afraid and scared and that sort of thing. And I just wanted to throw that out there just so you can have a proper perspective. This report is free for anyone to read. It’s huge and it has a ton of information in it. They have initiatives on how they want to handle driver’s safety. They have a special area for driver for women drivers also, all the initiatives that we’ve covered here on this channel and that sort of thing. So there’s a plethora of information there for you. They say they’re being transparent because one, they want to show that they are open for room for growth. They want to kind of admit their mistakes or their weak points and they are hopeful that this transparency will help and we’ll be waiting. We’ll be waiting to see if next year’s numbers are similar with all these great safety initiatives that they’ve employed. We should see a difference.

Speaking of safety on Monday night, ABC Nightline will air Lyft, Uber, women drivers and harassment. If you are a woman driver and you’ve had an issue with Lyft releasing passenger info after an incident, there is a reporter that wants to talk to you. Her email is in the description, so I’m going to leave that there for you guys.

And now for what would you do? What do you do with the trash in your car well apparently this rideshare driver doesn’t think you should do anything with it. A rider snap the photo of this trash bag in the back of an Uber’s car. If you look closely, there is an old food container from seven 11, ew, who eats from seven 11 and also there’s a pile of dust on her door. So I’ve doubt that she’s vacuumed in a while. I can only imagine how that thing smells.

Do you think this rider was wrong for posting this? How often do you clean your car and seriously, there’s got to be a better way of disposing of trash. If you’ve got a system that works, let us know in the comments. That’s it for this week. It’s a rainy, we can’t here in Los Angeles and I’m loving it because I’m from Sacramento and it rains and it feels like winter is here. It doesn’t feel like Groundhog day. It’s not 70 degrees every single day. So I’m enjoying it, got the window open so I can show off this rainy weather.

Anyway if you like this video, give us a thumbs up. If you’re not subscribed to this channel, please subscribe. This is Harry’s channel, The RideShare Guy is a ton contributors on here creating videos for you. And if you’re curious about me and what I do, I’m Cecily, I’m a ride share driver and blogger and you can find more out, more about me on my channel. In the description. Peace out. Bye.