BS. They turn a blind eye.
I am sure they would be shocked to know that thousands of drivers are showing up at schools and not picking up teachers every day. They are hiding behind the TOS while letting it happen.
Anyway, to answer the OP from a driver perspective, go ahead and sign up for both services. You will be doing the same thing as thousands of other parents across the nation. If a driver from one service refuses to pick up your son (very unlikely with a 17 y/o) then use the other service.
Also if a driver cancels your ride it doesn’t mean that the service will ban you or care if you ask for a pickup from school again in the future. It will only mean that they will not send the same driver to pick up your child next time. They want your money and try at every possible turn to place responsibility on the driver.
Again, I’ve done over 3000 rides recently and know how they operate. I should start a “Ask the rideshare driver 2019” thread. I’ve got stories to tell.
Do it!
Just to note that, in post #3, the OP said:
“Our child is in high school, but not yet 17.”
Noted. I’ve taken to and picked up at junior high schools. Any younger than that the parents usually tag along, seems to be a socially accepted cutoff. But the standard appears to be old enough to have your own cell phone then you are old enough to rideshare (or at least old enough for your parents to consider).
Still in Michigan it is not against the law to provide rides to minors. Like I said, it easy to see it happening everyday when school lets out and kids are trying to figure out which rideshare is theirs.
I have more of an issue with people with small children and no car seats. That is illegal. The issue with picking up minors isn’t going to go away or be taken seriously by the companies until some tragic incident happens. Either that or autonomous vehicles become a viable alternative.
Oh and I almost forgot. One thing I see many parents doing is staying on the phone with their child during the whole ride. Texting me or calling me with information, just to let me know they are aware of me. They can also track the ride and see if I go off the designated course. Also, they did do a background check on me and make sure I have insurance.
Or parents, for that matter. Not all parents of high school students have cars. Cars are in the shop sometimes, in use by someone else in the household, etc.
They “turn a blind eye” the way GM “turns a blind eye” when someone uses their cars to transport murder victims in the trunk. But I stand behind my original statement: neither Uber nor Lyft have any capability to track the people which use or deliver their services* - at best, they can track the phones of those people and, as you know, many times the phone which ordered the ride is not on the people taking the trip.
*Uber does, at times, ask for a picture to verify the drivers identity. However, I once had it accept a picture of my drivers license photo, so that’s about the limits of their ability to track me. 
Sometimes yes. Most of the time no. Did you miss the point that I actually haven driven for these companies and actually picked up people at schools? That the destination from Uber and Lyft says high school pick up? And that 100 out 100 times it was a student?
I consistantly picked up and dropped off kids everyday. This is not just my humble opinion.
But of course we are IMHO, so I should not be getting uptight when people give their opinion. Peace.
Thanks for the advice, all.
One thing I have to consider is that this is a time-sensitive drive. My kid has to get from the academic school to the arts school within a certain window of time. The driving service set-up – Uber, Lyft, or whatever – would have to operate like clockwork with no foreseeable hitches. Everything going great for the first two or three rides, and then the driver refusing the next drive citing policy – that won’t work here. There wouldn’t be time to set up another drive.
Some drivers make personal arrangements with favored/regular passengers. I don’t do this, but it is done.
Also, have you thought about reaching out to other parents at the school, seeing what their solutions have been?
We have a personal driver, that we hire to drop off and pick us up for specific events like dinners, concerts, sporting events, airport drop-offs, etc. He also drives for Uber and Lyft. He uses the Square app for us to swipe our card when we settle up. He’s taken our kids places, taken our dog and dropped it off at the kennel, etc.
Hunt around, I’m sure you can someone like this to chauffeur your kid around.
This is all in the context of working with another set of parents. Up until a few weeks ago, there were three sets of parents ride-sharing – only three kids from the high school go to the art school in the afternoons.
One of the three kids got a schedule change – they are now attending the art school three hours earlier than the other two kids (mine and another). So that family dropped out of the ride-share arrangement. That’s not so big a problem, though. The real issue is that my wife and I are down a vehicle after a December auto accident (totalling one of our cars, only carried liability on a 16-year-old car). With sharing a vehicle with my wife, I am taking the bus to work a few days a week and cannot drive from high-school to art-school as often as I used to.
Working with the other parents … we can cover all the drives except Thursday going to art school. For this week, I had taken Thursday off … so I can make the drive this one time. We’re all trying to work with our employers and see who can be free when to do this, but we just can’t seem to get Thursday covered. We were kinda counting on Uber/Lyft as a last resort. C’est la vie.
Uber and Lyft read boards such as this and are aware of people using their services to transport children. I never said track I said they know drivers pick up children. There is a huge differance. They also have the ability to physically track drivers to see who they pick up or even send out decoy customers to see if drivers pick up children. In a court case it would not be credible for them to say they did all they could do to stop drivers from picking up children or that they didn’t know.
The real world problem will be when someone’s kid comes up missing after getting into a supposed Uber or Lyft. It would be too easy for someone to show up at a school with a Uber or Lyft sign and pick up some kid who wasn’t aware of the drivers name or make of car. Since they show up all the time and pick up kids they could be said to have created the problem.
You know that someone from Uber is reading the SDMB looking for violations? You have a cite for this claim?
I suspect Uber and Lyft will clamp down on this violation of their terms when the first kid is kidnapped/molested/murdered/injured by a driver.
How does this happen? Because the only way you can prove the driver purposely took kids, with no adults, is to allow the driver to drive away with children in (his) car.
They can’t use real kids, because Uber would possibly be in the commission of, well, a lot of crimes. Uber can’t order their employees to use their own kids because, again, crimes.
So I don’t see how “decoy customers”, with the necessary “decoy children”, even works.
*Again, no. Not unless, of course, they are following me. But via the apps? No, they cannot track people.
I mean, I went through a month of unemployment, got a rental car (against TOS), drove it for a month making about $1,200/week (paying Budget $180) and I kept texting my customers that “my car is in the shop, my loaner looks like…” via the Uber app itself.
And I didn’t hear a word. Neither from Uber nor Lyft, and in that time period I easily gave over 800 rides. Not a single time did they say “Hey, you’re using the wrong car! WTF?”
… but yet they have teams of people reading the SDMB and decoy children who are somehow immune to child-labor laws and kidnapping risk. lol.
There are numerous boards where Lyft and Uber drivers post and yes they read them. If you want to play the fool go on without me.
Wow. You just proved my point that Uber doesn’t care if drivers follow the TOS. All they care about is getting paid. I am pointing out things they could do and don’t. So are you.
To try to be helpful for the OP, I will say that although Uber and Lyft will not transport unaccompanied minors, there are many services that have propped up recently on the web that will do so. I don’t know what’s available where he/she lives, but some names are HopSkipDrive, Zum, and Kango.