Uber and Lyft do not allow unaccompanied minors, for a host of reasons. I imagine legal liability is at the top.
However, from where I sit, it seems a good business model. Many parents are stressed out getting their kids from here to there, and there are a lot of things that older kids need to do that they can handle on their own, but for their inability to drive or take public transportation there.
I know that, when I was in a volunteer capacity where I’d have to be around children under the age of 18, I was fingerprinted and underwent a background check first. I see no reason why a rideshare service can’t do the same to their drivers. Similarly, cameras that record the interiors of cars can be had reasonably cheaply; again, no reason not to require drivers to have those.
Is the potential for legal liability so high here that such a service just wouldn’t work?
Around here the schools sometimes use taxis to transport kids in special circumstances.
Of course, around here the taxi companies themselves are licensed, and drivers have to have a Chauffeur’s license and no DUIs or DWIs, submit to a background check, and be fingerprinted, registered and have a photo ID. And both the companies and the drivers have to repeat the process at regular intervals.
I suspect the taxi companies have MASSIVE insurance or bonds behind them if they get sued.
The business model isn’t as good as it seems at first. You need a special pool of carefully vetted drivers to attract customers. Those more reliable drivers can usually find better jobs, so to attract them, you need to pay them more, relative to Lyft and Uber. The demand for your extra-special drivers is all concentrated in a very narrow window of time - right when school lets out but before parents get home from work. So you can only book those premium drivers on jobs for about two hours per day on weekdays. Lyft and Uber drivers can work 50 hours per week or more to make ends meet. If your premium drivers aren’t earning enough to make it worthwhile, they will quit. Sure, your drivers can try the tactic of working for you at a premium during your prime hours and driving for Uber and Lyft during other hours but, if your drivers also drive for Uber and Lyft, it reduces your specialness and the premium that parents would be willing to pay. Uber and Lyft will siphon off the price-conscious, rule-bending segment of the market by providing lowest-bidder drivers to provide essentially the same service. None of rideshare-for-kids businesses is ever going to make more money than Lyft or Uber and there’s a good chance that Lyft and Uber will never make any money. Good luck with that business.
Historically, the way taxi companies dealt with liability was to be poor to sue and bankruptcy-remote from any company with a real asset. Each taxi was incorporated as a separate entity. This entity leases the car, the brand, and the medallion from another company or companies. It distributes its profits as soon as it earns them. If the cab driver got in a horrifying accident, the victim sued the taxi company and discovered it had less money than the methhead on the corner, who at least has $5 for his next hit.
States mandate bonds and insurance for drivers but those bonds are usually tiny relative to the liability a driver can cause. What the bonds really are is evidence that some insurance company looked at the driver and was willing to take at least a little risk on them. Different cities and states handle this differently though so your mileage may vary.
There is the question as to who is the other end of the trip. Suppose a kid gets dropped off at his destination and there is no one there? Or is the driver supposed to only drop the kid off if there is someone there to receive him?
There’s a rideshare that accepts unaccompanied minors around here, which has been going for a couple of years (so not that much less than Uber, really) and seems pretty stable.
However, children are not their primary market. Women are their primary market - it’s an all-female service with a focus on safety. And the government infrastructure is their to make a “children” addon easy for them - there’s a nationwide standard called the “Working with Children Check” which is pretty well respected, easy to get, and basically anyone whose job might ever involve talking to a child where their parents aren’t there has one.
Given all these constraints, their facebook comments are about half “ZOMG they were so nice and caring, it’s great to get a ride where you don’t have to worry about safety issues” and half “ZOMG they’re so freaking expensive”. Because all these things come with a cost, obviously. And providing a premium service then targetting a market that has slightly less than average disposable income (mums with young kids) is a difficult business model to pull off
I get the desire to not be the one driving my kid to all of their zillion-and-one appointments. Boy howdy do I get it.
On the other hand there’s no chance I’m putting my kid in a car with some rando that I hired off a phone app provided by your garden-variety bunch of amoral tech-bro startup sociopaths.
I have known some people around here who have started just such a service. Mostly as was said, for picking kids up after school. Also many kids need rides to their clubs, sports, or dr. appointments.
I have kids and while they are too young right now for this, there are probably a good 4+ years where I’d be comfortable with them traveling somewhere without direct parental or in-loco-parental supervision, but they’re too young to drive themselves.
I mean, I rode the bus and my bicycle all over town as a 13-year-old. Pretty sure I could have taken a taxi too if we had been rich.
Hell, based on the general quality of teenage drivers, I’d rather they take a taxi than drive themselves even from 16-18.
There are a number of such services here. My son’s school is 20 miles or so from where we live. I actively researching companies that could handle the transportation for us. For now, we’re managing with help from an afternoon car pool.
It isn’t really an Uber model though. I can’t just call up and get a car at my house in 15 minutes. It’s more of a contracted service, like all rides to school, or every Thursday to voice class or what have you. It’s not, I don’t think, intended for spur of the moment needs.
I looked into something like this years ago, in the hopes that I could quit my job and drive kids around, including my kids. I looked into it pretty thoroughly, trying to imagine everything that could go wrong with this business model.
And there was so much.
At the time, there was no Uber/Lyft so I wasn’t calling it “ride-sharing.” Among the factors were vehicle reliability, driver reliability (I was pretty reliable, but this wasn’t going to work if it was just me, one of my issues was one kid’s one place, another’s somewhere else, usually a 30-minute drive away and they both get out at the same time), availabiility of insurance–not at all a sure thing and, you guessed it, what if the driver took a child from, say, baseball to home, and there was nobody at home? What happens if there’s a wreck, if bad weather cancels whatever you’re taking the kid to, if the kid gets sick, if you screw up scheduling and forget to pick somebody up…
Too much. Looked like the only way to do this was to get other parents to share costs and have one parent, someone whose kid went to your kid’s school, drive to some common after-school activity. Or have the after-school activity provide a bus (like some day cares).
In other words, I thought it could work, and could eventually prove profitable, but it didn’t look like something that could provide a full-time paycheck immediately, and I needed that. It also looked like something with a hell of a lot of upfront costs, and I didn’t need that, and that would have gotten me even further from profitability.
I’m not a helicopter dad but this is really what we’re talking about here. Although this quote made me laugh, it boils down the reality of the idea perfectly.
You guys nuts? Couple of years ago, a poster on this board called the cops on a guy, with kids in a public park for just talking to kids.
These days, with the kind of hysteria we have, the only one who would want to work in a job with kids are i) Pedos and ii) very dumb masochists, neither of whom you want around any children.
I don’t think people are talking about very young children. Generally, with very young children you have to stay with them anyway–you don’t just dump a 7 year old off at practice or a birthday party or whatever, you stay there, mostly because it’s hard to supervise a room full of 7 year old kids and it’s preferable to have many adults. Someone may make arrangements in advance not to stay, but generally speaking you want a pretty high adult/child ratio. Ride sharing for kids would be more for the 12-18 set, who can’t drive themselves but who are pretty competent and responsible.
When I was in high school, probably half the kids had cars, as much for their parent’s convenience as anything. With the cost of cars and insurance for teens today, you could uber a LOT before a car became more practical. I was tutoring a group of students in Chicago Saturday, at a charter school. There were a couple hundred kids all released at once, and I saw a bunch get into ubers. Technically, I think that’s against policy, but it was clearly very expected. I’d be comfortable letting a high school kid ride in a local uber. I am not sure about a middle-schooler.