I’ve stated this before and people argue about it, but Uber and Lyft turn a blind eye to picking up kids. I used to drive for both of them and Uber and Lyft had to be aware that there were always several Lyfts and Ubers at every school, every day at opening and closing times. I had many kids just come up to the car, tell me there name and ask if I was their driver. I’m talking kids as young as 12, that is scary.
As an driver for Uber and Lyft you do not get paid to drive a couple of miles to pick someone up and not give them a ride. And even if you did, the only rides you would get after turning down a kid would be another kid from the same school.
For a board devoted to fighting ignorance, the amount of “stranger danger” on display here is disheartening.
Violence against children from random strangers is absurdly unlikely. It’s astronomically rare.
The fact that a kid is riding in a car, one of the most dangerous activities we regularly perform, is tens of thousands of times more dangerous than the fact that someone they don’t know personally is driving that car.
The average 12-year old is perfectly capable of taking a taxi, an Uber, a bus, a subway, or walking somewhere on their own, and doing so is not a dangerous activity.
To be fair, a stranger who has sought out a job that gives them unmonitored time with kids is not a random stranger. On the other hand, a person that has had a background check and been vetted is also not a random stranger.
It also makes a huge different whether you assume 6-year old or 12-year old. I’m a lot more likely to send a kid with a phone out in the world without a trusted adult. It’s not just about being assaulted–it’s being able to handle it if something goes wrong, from a flat tire to the driver’s phone dying and his losing the address to my kid getting sick and throwing up.
I think the problem in the OP is “rideshare”. My kids are grown, but I never would have put them as kids in an Uber or Lyft. Not because I have something against apps ( because I don’t) but because as far as I can tell, Uber and Lyft exist to make money without having any responsibility - they treat the drivers as independent contractors rather than employees whenever possible. I have no reason to think anybody at Uber has met any of the drivers, or knows enough/even has the ability to prevent a particular driver* from being assigned to pick up a kid. There are other means of getting kids around- I know afterschool centers that pick up kids from school , and regular car services will pick up those under 18 (probably not 6 year olds, but they will pick up 12 year olds) and there are even app based services like zum that specifically exist to transport kids and conduct background checks on their drivers. Zum actually requires that drivers have experience working with children
The owner/manager/dispatcher of a small local car service know their drivers and has the ability to keep problematic drivers from being assigned to pick up kids. And I don’t mean necessarily drivers with a history of molesting kids- if I’m having a car pick up my kid from school, I want someone who will reliably be there on time, not ten minutes late.
True, but there are existing procedures for vetting people who work with kids. And there are simple technical solutions like cameras to solve the “unmonitored” part. The impression I’m getting from some here is that it’s totally crazy to consider this because child molesters.
Which means it probably is totally crazy to consider because people have an unreasonable fear of child molesters.
That’s true, and I have been quite clear that I’m talking about kids that are capable of taking the bus or walking 10 minutes home from school.
This seems like more unnecessary worrying. Of all the times I might hire a car, the one I’m least worried about being a few minutes late would be picking my kid up from school. Are they going to miss an important appointment?
I can remember plenty of times I had to wait at school because my parents got stuck in traffic or incorrectly thought that I had cross country practice after school or whatever. I sat around in the library and waited. Schools already have a pretty good system for this. For any reasonably-sized school it’s probably a rare day that every kid is picked up within 10 minutes of school letting out.
QFT. In fact, an adolescent may well be safer being picked up by an Uber driver than a parent, if we can assume that people who drive cars for a living are safer than the average driver.
The fact that a large share of Uber drivers are non white might have something to do with the apprehension that people express toward using them, even if it’s subconscious bias.
Maybe - you know, it’s not unheard of kids to have appointments afterschool. But mostly because when my kids went to school, the teacher had to wait with kids below 6th grade who weren’t picked up and I wouldn’t want to do that to the teacher. It’s not always about fear- sometimes it’s about consideration for other people.
If you were able to sit around in the library to wait, you went to a very different school that any of those my kids or I went to - at those schools, when the school day was over you left unless you had an afterschool activity. And the teachers left unless they had an afterschool activity. So yeah, in the case of kids young enough to need to be picked up , pretty much every day every kid was picked up within five minutes of dismissal.
Although you might be talking about kids who are capable of walking or taking the bus home, I am left to wonder why I would be paying for *any *sort of car to pick up a kid who can walk or take the bus home. The only reasons I can see to use an Uber/Lyft/cab would be 1) to get a kid who can’t walk or take the bus to someone who can’t pick them up - maybe my 7 year old is going to stay at my sister’s house after school but it’s difficult for my sister to do the pickup because she has three preschool aged kids or 2) to get a kid who can normally walk or take the bus to a place where walking or taking the bus isn’t feasible like a dance class or Grandma’s house.
In his autobiography, singer/guitarist Bob Mould said that when he and his siblings were small children in the early 1960s, their mother had a job but could not drive due to medical issues and his father was usually drunk, so she would often call a cab and put these 3 or 4 small children in it to take them to the babysitter, and give the money to the oldest child.
I was surprised that they would do this, even back then, but this was in the days before mandatory car seats as well.
It’s been a while so my memory is not perfect, but my recollection for elementary school is that there was someone in authority (a teacher or administrator) out in front of the school for maybe 10 minutes after school let out, mostly just to maintain basic order and keep the masses of children from surging into traffic in their post-educational glee. And then after that ten minutes if you were still standing there waiting for a pickup, then you would be corralled inside, could use the phone in the office to call your parents, etc. Presumably at some point the authorities would have been called if they couldn’t reach anyone on your contact card.
I am impressed that every kid is picked up within 5 minutes of school being let out. Perhaps it’s a much smaller school? My elementary school was ~400 students and my middle school was around 800 I think? Even a really reliable driver ends up stuck in traffic once or twice a year. Which is going to equate to someone being late to pick their kid up just about every day.
Waiting in the library was something that happened at middle school. And I’m pretty sure the library was just open for an hour after school for library-access related reasons like people going to find books and do research for school, so it wasn’t a burden on anyone.
My general point is that there’s often someone around a school for a while after it lets out, and while you shouldn’t take advantage of that, it’s generally not a big deal for a few kids to have to wait in the office or something for 10 or 20 minutes if their ride gets held up.
I will note that my parents (who were very conscientious!) did forget me at school for an hour once, a thing that app driven car-hire seems very unlikely to do.
What I meant by that is kids who would be old enough to take the bus or walk home. I’m assuming that most kids who get picked up by hired car are from fairly wealthy families because hired cars aren’t cheap, and they do so either because the kid lives too far away to walk or the buses don’t go there, or maybe special circumstances like the ones you mentioned.
My point is just that kids who are old enough to generally travel known routes by themselves (and I’m generalizing that to be about age 12 and up) by foot or public transit can also safely take an Uber and we shouldn’t freak out about it.
When my kids were in grade school there were about 300 kids, when I went it was about 800. But it was the type of neighborhood where everyone was within walking distance ( the furthest was less than a mile) and even those who drove only had a very short drive -like 5 minutes on streets where you wouldn’t get stuck in traffic. It’s kind of difficult to blame being 10 or 20 minutes late on traffic when you don’t even live a mile away.
I agree- but I don’t think there are actually many people who would allow a 12+ year old to take a public bus but not an Uber. I suspect that most people who wouldn’t let a 12 year old take an Uber probably also wouldn’t let the 12 year old take a bus. You’d be surprised at how many people I know, even in NYC , who drove their kids to high school or made then attend the one in the neighborhood .
Or the parent asks their kid be taken to 123 Elm Street, when they really meant 123 Elm Road. Driver arrives and kid has no idea where he is. Meanwhile, driver is trying to make his rent and has another rider he can pick up.
Yeah, I expect that’s pretty common for elementary schools. But even then, it’s really hard to always show up on time to something, even if you’re pretty close. Car batteries last maybe 5 years or so, so once every 1500 days, I’m very late to somewhere because the car doesn’t start. Sometimes the baby has a major poop-related catastrophe right before you put her in the car. Or a sibling broke an arm and had to go to the hospital. Or you get in a fender bender on the way to school. Or whatever.
And I’m sure there are parents like my dad, who (half the time) were driving all the way across town to pick me up because after a divorce both parents didn’t live in the same school district.
I don’t doubt that 99% of parents are there every day within 5 minutes, but it only takes one being late a day for the school to have to have a procedure in place to handle it. And my impression is that they all do and it’s regularly employed in any school with hundreds of students.
Yes, and as I said in an earlier post, the procedure was the teacher stayed until the kid was picked up when she could otherwise have left.* Which is the reason I said I’d wouldn’t want a driver to be ten minutes late to pick my kid up from school.
I assume if it got be be too long, the police or CPS would have been called but I don’t know of that actually happening.
Right, I get that. I just don’t see it as a huge imposition. Like, there was always a teacher or two who had something to do in their classroom after school, and they rotated who was going to stay slightly late and while it’s technically true that if everyone were on time then those one or two people could have left right at 3:05pm, the system was set up so that there was someone who could do some useful work for a half-hour or so because, well, people are late sometimes.
Teachers almost always have to do some lesson plan or grading prep work outside of normal school hours and once or twice a week they’ll plan to do a little of that with one or two kids hanging out in their classroom waiting for a pickup.
None of this is to say that you should abuse the system by regularly showing up late, or that timeliness isn’t important in a hired car. But it’s not especially important when picking up kids from school. It’s just important in the normal way that you shouldn’t be habitually late to things because it wastes other people’s time, but we all accept that sometimes the unexpected happens and it’s not really a big deal.
This is a daily battle here in my market. I have been screamed at on the phone a dozen times in the last year by parent/account holders for refusing to pick up their 8-12 year old that they left home alone to get picked up by Uber.
Most drivers don’t care. The general attitude is “I’m here, I might as well get the money”. The fact that Uber seems to have stopped paying cancellation fees for underage riders only amplified the problem.
If you want to try arranging rides for your minors, there is a very common stunt drivers pull.
Sit in front of a high or middle school, accept request, kid shows…no ID, they wait for rider to cancel or claim no show. $4. I have seen call logs from drivers who have done this 8-10times in 30 min at a high school.