Uber Blog

Uber is not being banned just because of this rape incident. Uber did not following Indian laws & Delhi transport regulations, and operated illegally under the radar. Before this incident, Delhi Government was not aware about how Uber operated. This incident prompted Indian authorities to investigate the operations of Uber.

Uber's stance is that we are not a taxi company, we are an app company; so we do not need to follow transportation laws.

Uber is so secretive in India that the only way users can contact Uber is through Twitter. They don't provide any phone number, email or address. Moreover, Delhi police had to struggle to get in touch with Uber. They called an Uber cab using the App, and asked the driver to take them to Uber's office. When they reached office, it was almost empty. There was nobody who had any information about what is going on.

Uber claims they have a driver screening process, but it seems they skip through the due diligence process in India to save few bucks.

https://www.uber.com/safety

"Uber is committed to connecting you to the safest ride on the road"

Driver Screening:

http://blog.uber.com/driverscreening

which includes:

Criteria for drivers to pass through Uber’s screening, going back seven years:

- No DUI or other drug related driving violations or severe infractions*

- No Hit and Runs

- No fatal accidents

- No history of reckless driving

- No violent crimes

- No sexual offenses

- No gun related violations

- No resisting/evading…

This caught my eye.

> Supervisor Jane Kim wrote on Facebook after the incident that Muzzafar had self-identified as an Uber driver. Uber later released a statement saying the driver had not being "doing a trip on the Uber system" at the time and Supervisor Kim later revised her statement, naming him as a "non-taxi, for-pay driver." Uber declined to clarify to SFist whether the driver may have been available for Uber rides at the time.

Supervisor Kim's statement, in the link below, raised questions about the standard of driving of those working for Uber, Lyft, Sidecar, etc:

>In addition, the driver was a non-taxi, for-pay driver. Certainly this incident raises questions regarding the driver training and selection process for the increasing number of ride share drivers on our city streets. While emerging driver service apps fulfill an important need for flexible on-demand transportation in San Francisco, we must examine a universal baseline of scrutiny and safety oversight for these services. http://sfist.com/2014/01/01/7-year-old_girl_struck_and_killed_i.php

Is it unfair? The following comment on SFAppeal lists a string of accidents involving Uber drivers in San Francisco.

http://sfappeal.com/2014/01/uber-distances-itself-from-driver-arrested-for-allegedly-striking-and-killing-6-year-old/#comment-1184563542

Finally, here is Uber's statement, where they emphasize that the driver was not actively "doing a trip" at the…

Uber is pretty great, and I enjoy using it, but many of these statistics are pretty weak and out of context. As others have mentioned, using "income" to describe "revenue" is inaccurate. You can't compare making $90k driving an Uber to $90k at a desk job with a completely different set of expenses.

While the statistics used to determine the DUI rate in SF and Taxi crime in Chicago are beyond the levels of my knowledge and I can't verify their correctness, the calculations certainly seem a bit suspect. For example, as a pair city when doing a discontinuity test, they chose San Francisco, a city which notably, has Uber. The post doesn't mention a confidence interval or P value in a clear explicit way (outside of the table, with unexplained column headers).[1]

In the infographic, they claim these statistics as facts without mention of any underlying confidence intervals. I'm pro Uber, but this post seems to contain a lot of fuzzy math. It'd be interesting if someone with a statistics background could confirm or deny these suspicions...

[1] http://blog.uber.com/DUIratesdecline

> Uber's innovation was in removing a hails requirement for a mutual line-of-sight between the passenger and a cab. This increases the number of cabs accessible to a user. It also allows cabs to move towards users, which is analogous to providing an index to speed up a locality of reference problem in a computer [0].

That's not Uber's innovation, since livery cars are not allowed to accept hailed fares in most places anyway. The only difference is an app instead of traditional voice.

I don't understand your point about gypsies; "gypsy cab" is a pretty widely understood term for an illegal, unlicensed cab. At least, Uber seems to think so: http://blog.uber.com/2013/08/18/stay-safe-avoid-gypsy-cabs/

Uber Advanced Technologies Center — Pittsburgh — Full Time

We focus on vehicle autonomy, mapping and safety systems. We're hiring across a range of areas to support this work: machine learning, planning, control, mapping, perception and simulation. More info about the center here: http://blog.uber.com/carnegie-mellon

We're also looking for senior mobile and backend engineers.

http://www.uberatc.com/hiring/ or send me an email: sweeney@uber.com