At a glance, Uber’s and Lyft’s ridesharing accidents reports are impressive. But something is conspicuously absent from their data: the thousands of accidents involving the Uber and Lyft apps.
Also missing from the reports is any information about driver crashes when they’re waiting to be hailed, but don’t have a passenger in their car and aren’t on their way to a pickup.
These missing pieces make it hard to determine exactly how safe Uber & Lyft are from a motor vehicle crash perspective.
Such information must be indirectly determined from other sources. For example, when economists from the University of Chicago and Rice University in Houston looked at ride-sharing services and traffic deaths they found that, when a service like Uber of Lyft was launched in a city, fatal accidents increased.
Uber and Lyft expressed skepticism about the study’s methods and said that their services increase safety because they reduce dangerous behaviors like drunk driving. On the other hand, a Montgomery County Uber driver was recently accused of picking up passengers while intoxicated.
- A California state report shows that rideshare drivers are involved in more than 1,100 accidents per month.
- Another study out of California found that, over a 3-year period, accidents occurring in rideshare vehicle generated more than 9,000 insurance claims that caused $185.6 million in losses.
- A 2021 statistical analysis of rideshare app accidents published by the CDC concluded that ridesharing was associated with increased crash incidence for motorists and pedestrians at trip origin and destination points.
One can’t help but ask: if the total accident and injury rates for Uber and Lyft were also lower than the national average, wouldn’t this data be included in company reporting? Their failure to release this data is worrying and begs the question of what they might be hiding.
