Do pizza drivers get into significantly more accidents or more serious accidents (i.e. causing more damage or casualties) than other drivers?
I can’t find any statistics about a rate… but I do know that the company is forced to pay worker’s comp if the driver’s not at fault because the accident occurred on company time.
I delivered pizza and managed a pizza restaurant for about 7 years and I can only recall one on-duty accident at that restaurant. We were a small independent place, and we did 10 times the delivery business of Domino’s or Pizza Hut. We also had a huge delivery area, which meant a much longer average trip than a Domino’s driver would have.
I had an accident once, but I’m not counting it because nobody was behind the wheel at the time. My truck (which was titled to my dad) rolled out of a driveway and hit a parked car. Since nobody was driving, my insurance company just paid for the damage and let it go.
This snope’s article about Domino’s delivery is of interest here.
Peace,
mangeorge
Most pizza (and other delivery food, like Indian or Chinese) here is delivered on mopeds or scooters by young men who have only done their CBT (compulsory basic training) and haven’t passed their test. You see these beaten up little bikes with L plates when you’re driving, you know to give them a wide berth. They drive like mad people. I’m always seeing accidents involving them. In fact coincidentally I saw one only yesterday - a young man had pulled his bike off the pavement without looking into three lanes of city traffic and had a compound fracture of his left leg.
“Here” is South London, by the way.
The plural of anecdote is not data, however I delivered for about 8 years for a moderately busy (several hundred deliveries in total on a Friday) store in a suburban/exurban area and I recall only 3 collisions with other vehicles. Both were the fault of the non-pizza driver. We did have numerous collisions with deer, probably 10 or so. I’d guess that our accident rate per mile was probably lower than the average driver in the same region.
Wild guessing as to why:
The majority of driving was done at night, after rush hour, when the roads are less crowded. Fewer car=better visibility, more passing opportunities, larger separation between cars, and less difficulty entering and leaving the main road. Accidents tend to peak during rush hours, presumably for the opposite reason. Deer collisions were high (probably higher than in the general population) because that’s when deer are active.
Also, delivery drivers are far less likely to be intoxicated than the population as a whole, due to lack of opportunity and oversight. It’s hard to get drunk while you are washing dishes and the boss is ten feet away.
The maniac pizza driver is, nowadays, a myth, in my opinion. The fear of losing your job for driving badly probably has something to do with it. You have a big glowing sign on your car with the store’s phone number on it. If you piss someone off, your boss is going to chew you out as soon as you come in the door.
On a 5 mile round trip, how much time can you shave off by blowing stop signs, screeching around corners, or going 60 instead of 45 in a 35 mph zone? Not nearly enough to make up for a botched order that needs to be remade. We were never pressured to drive fast or recklessly, as the minimal gain in speed is not worth the bad community relations and increased risk of a lawsuit.
How would anyone be able to give a factual answer to this, since there isn’t a category on the police accident reports to mark that one of the vehicles was a “pizza driver”? All you can get is anecdotes – and we all know what they are worth.
Big fan of anecdotes here.
If it weren’t for anecdotes, in many cases, we wouldn’t know nothin’.
That’s because, imo, many things aren’t “important” enough to report or research.
I take anecdotes and some scientific research with an equal grain of salt. Witness “intelligent design”.
The reason I asked the question is that I heard that most insurance companies won’t insure pzza drivers. Those few that do charge through the nose for the insurance. So I was wondering if they had some kind of objective reason (e.g. high accident rates) or it was just prejudice. My guess is that it’s the latter, based mainly or even entirely on the 1993 Domino’s court case reported in that Snope’s page (thank you for that link).
Do insurance companies also not insure other people who use their own car for work, such as people who deliver newspapers or Chinese food?
Ah, so I can finally reveal my pizza-driving past. The only markup on my insurance was for work-use of my car. At the time on my meager military salary (which I why I was also delivering pizzas), the rate wasn’t significantly higher. This was 1995 or so, I certainly can’t remember the figures, but it was non-consequential. My car was no-fault, full coverage, loss-payee, current model year, out of state coverage (since my policy was from Michigan and the car and I were in Texas).
To repeat some of the anecdotal “data” from other posters, there were zero accidents during my time in service, and I think perhaps zero cited infractions. We tried to be quick, but not reckless. Time was money, but a $100 fine would have wiped out an entire night’s pay.
My experience was the same as Balthisar’s, a very small increase in rate due to use of the vehicle for work and extra mileage. I’m not even sure they asked what kind of work it was.
How do delivery people get paid? I mean, how is the amount of pay determined? It seems like gravy for the pizza companies who don’t have to provide anything except for the pizzas.
Who buys the GPS? 
I chauffeured pizzas full-time for nearly 5 years to put myself through Engineering school. Yes, I worked full-time while in school as well; summer was for overtime. I took more than 50,000 deliveries and did not have a single accident, except:
- Someone deliberately hit me once with their car to try to injure me.
- Someone hit my parked car in their own driveway.
In all the time I delivered, there were only one accident I knew of - a guy who ran a red light, and it didn’t happen on an especially busy night, it was just random bad luck. Another time a driver had his car wrecked by the wife of another driver, who sailed right into it at the pizza store. On a clear blue day she ran into the back of a parked Lincoln Town Car, and told the police she “didn’t see it.”
We talked quite a lot with drivers from other stores in the area, and competitors such as Dominoes. I do know the Dominoes store, in the time I was working, had maybe 1 accident a year, none of them serious.
There has to be an interesting story behind this.
I wanted to ask the same thing. Please!
Peace,
mangeorge
This strikes me as something that logically must be false. If it were impossible for pizza delivery drivers to obtain insurance, pulling over pizza drivers for proof of insurance would be shooting fish in a barrel for law enforcement.
Most if not all insurance companies will charge more if you use your car for any type of work. Maybe whoever told you that really meant “won’t cover for the same price” rather than “won’t cover.”
I also expect that Worker’s Comp. will usually pay the driver’s medical bills even if the driver is at fault in the accident. Worker’s Comp insurance operates on a no-fault principle so that lawyers don’t have to get involved in determining fault every time a worker has an on-the-job accident. Workers are at fault in plenty of non-car-related workplace accidents, but are still covered by WC insurance. It’s sort of a “society’s best interest to get the medical bills paid” approach.
From this site http://journalists.workerscompensation.com/general_legal_principles.php
"The common theme in all Workers’ Compensation laws is that it doesn’t matter who was at fault when the accident occurred, although a body of cases has arisen over such issues as horseplay, intoxication, engaging in criminal acts during work, willful disobedience to the instructions of the employer, etc. "
WC won’t pay anything other than employees’ medical-related costs though. Auto insurance would be needed for injuries to non-employees and property damage.
Sorry for the double post.
I’d be really surprised if insurance companies didn’t have actuarial data on accident rates and costs for pizza drivers. Both auto and WC insurers would have past claims history. I’m not sure there’s any place or reason they’d make this public, though.
My father used work in construction and would drive from 14 to 120 miles a day. A little increase for wear on the policy.
As for anecdotal evidence, I’m surprised the Domino’s that delivers to me didn’t have more accidents. It takes 20 mins wthout traffic to get to my place. They must have been driving like maniacs to get to me during the “30 minute guarantee” time since I only order on Friday nights.
Here in California, at least once upon a time (20 yrs ago?), There was a program that would assign high risk and new drivers to an insurance company. They did so in some sort of rotation, but I don’t know how they balanced it among large and small insurers.
Peace,
mangeorge
You heard wrong. Insurance companies most certainly insure delivery drivers. I’m an insurance actuary, and as it happens I spent part of last week forecasting loss costs for an insured that included restaurant auto delivery.
If you hire delivery drivers, you need three types of insurance–auto liability, auto physical damage, and workers comp. The first is for injuries and auto damage caused to others by your drivers. The second is for damage to your own cars. The third is for injuries sustained by your drivers while on the job.
The autos in turn can be either owned by the restaurant, or can be “hired non-owned” in a situation where the delivery drivers provide their own vehicles. Where the latter is the case, when the driver is in an accident, the restaurant will reimburse for damage to the vehicle.
From an insurer standpoint, auto risk (both liability and PD) is considered per auto rather than per driver or per miles driven. In general, I would characterize delivery auto risk as relatively (but not hugely) high frequency and relatively low severity. Delivery autos do get involved in a fair number of accidents–they’re typically driven a lot–several trips per night–over different routes by young and inexperienced drivers.
But there are mitigating factors. The most reckless drivers should be screened out during the hiring process, and as noted above, they tend not to be intoxicated. Then too, delivery autos are on the smallish side, and less capable (relative to a truck) of inflicting deadly damage on other cars.
Insurance companies rate WC per $100 of payroll, and it’s pretty much the same story–high frequency, low severity. Drivers don’t make a ton of money, so payroll is low and claims per unit of payroll is high. But there are fewer fatal and debilitating injuries relative to, for example, heavy industrial work.