This happened last month: a lady passenger filmed an Uber driver screaming at her to get out of his car while she sat in his car’s right rear seat and asks many times “where is my destination” and admonishing him for yelling at her. The driver continues to yell, threatens to call 911 and eventually walks around the car and opens the right rear door while the woman continues to instruct him in how he should behave. He returns to the driver’s seat and continues to demand that she exit his car.
That man should not be an Uber driver and I wonder what happened before she began filming. I think it’s pretty likely he didn’t begin screaming with no provocation at all.
That passenger should have gotten out of the car when this situation escalated like this and contacted Uber. She shares in the responsibility for prolonging this. Once she had documented the behavior on video she accomplished all she could / needed to, and remaining in the car only escalated this.
She wasn’t ready when he arrived, and he sat waiting, unable to start the trip, but
when she came out finally, she told him she was in a hurry, totally missing how that came across to him after he’d been kept waiting (time is money for him), and anyway, what can he do, speed? He gets there as fast as he can for every passenger.
She entered the wrong address as her destination. He followed the GPS app to the address she entered until it said “Ride over,” but she told him it wasn’t where she wanted to be, and she didn’t know where she was. He asked her for a corrected address, and she didn’t have one.
Possibly, she expected to be able to vocalize a location like “the emergency room,” and have the driver get her there, the way you can with a taxi-- or could back in the day. But Uber doesn’t work like that. If you can’t input an address, you can’t go there.
I got the sense that she wasn’t a native English speaker, and when she was saying “Where is my destination?” she may simply have meant “Where am I?” which infuriated the driver, because he thought she should know where she is, since she put in the address. I suppose it’s possible she wanted him to generate the address for her, which a nice person would do for a little old lady who hadn’t already gotten on his bad side by keeping him waiting, and then expecting him to hurry, and whatever else she may have done.
The brief interaction with the cop sounds like she wanted to go to the hospital, and put in the street address maybe for the administration building, when she wanted the Emergency Room, and once they were there, she expected the driver to drive around and look for the ER. That’s not difficult, but she may have pressed his buttons by repeating that she was in a hurry, or being particularly unhelpful in finding the ER with him-- expecting him to do all the work-- again, like a taxi, which Uber isn’t.
No, none of that excuses his behavior, but I can see how hers may have factored into his. I have heard lots of stories from Uber drivers of passengers doing all kinds of things that caused them to have to call the cops to get people out of their cars. I have heard from women who had drunk men say things to them that were inappropriate enough, that they pulled over immediately and ordered them out of the car; I know a guy who had a pick-up that was 12 guys who called an UberX, when they should have called an UberXL, and tried to pile into his car, including the trunk. I heard of a guy who drove two other guys straight to the police station after they made a drug deal in his car.
I hope Uber dropped that driver, but I hope they investigated that passenger too. She may need some in depth instruction in how to use the app, and what Uber does, and does not do.
She was enjoying every passive aggressive second of baiting him and he was falling for it. He’s too much of a stupid rageaholic to deal with the public but I can see exactly how he got there given her responses.
I’ll give you that she was in a hurry and late (he stated that). However, it sure sounded like she spoke perfect english. My guess is that she was being a rude to him on the drive in other way. Including the ‘durp I don’t know where I am, can you tell me where I am’. For example, I just quickly looked up the ER address for three nearby hospitals, it’s the same address as the hospital itself (for reasons related to my job, I know most of hospital address off the top of my head). So if you said “I need to go to St Jacobs Emergency Room” and he typed that into his GPS, it’s going to take him to the front door. Sure, he could, even should take her to the ER entrance, but he could also say ‘look, the Uber/GPS app says I’m at the right place’. All that “I don’t know where I am” was just bullshit to get him worked up so she could put it on youtube.
As we hear more and more about bad Uber passengers, maybe some of these drivers should put cameras in their cars. Wouldn’t it be nice if Uber could review a camera and say ‘sorry it wasn’t fake puke, we have video of you actually puking’ or respond to this lady by saying ‘just take down the youtube video and all references to the incident and we’ll drop it, otherwise we’ll release the video of you treating him like dirt for the 25 minutes, the public should see both sides’.
TLDR; I’m not going to say for sure who started it, but I really doubt she was the perfect angel she appeared to be on the video during the entire drive.
I take seriously that Uber drivers are not employees. What Uber does is hook me up with a driver who wants to give me a ride for money. That’s HIS car, and so long as it’s not the middle of nowhere where I can’t get another ride, I will leave his car if he asks me to for whatever reason. Although if it’s a bad reason he’ll get bad feedback and a call to Uber and he won’t be available on the app much longer.
Sorry, I’m confused. I’ve never used the service so I don’t know it inside out obviously. But are you saying if I order a car, get to the specified address and discover, in fact, I’m at the wrong entrance, (I need to go round the back, say?), the driver can just say, ‘Tough darts, this is the address you gave. Get out now please!’ ?
That seems harsh. What if it’s a little old lady and it’s snowing? What if it’s dark and dangerous out?
This seems unlikely to me. But, as someone up thread mentioned, they aren’t taxis!
I’m guessing if it’s the wrong drop-off address it’s also up to the driver’s discretion. If it’s the other side of the block and would be difficult to walk to, I’m guessing most drivers will be nice and take you around the block. But if it’s actually a few minute drive, like you put in 300 Elm St and you needed to go to 300 N. Elm St, then that is more difficult. It’s not like a taxi where the driver could just turn the meter back on in order to see what it costs. I think what would need to happen is that the passenger should then get out their phone and request a ride to 300 N. Elm St and the driver of the car they are already sitting in would immediately accept it, and so the passenger would be charged for the initial ride to 300 Elm, and then charged for a second ride from 300 Elm to 300 N. Elm. But if people are impatient, and both think that the other screwed something up, then I could see things getting heated and no one coming to a reasonable agreement.
Generally speaking, best practice among drivers when the ride starts is to confirm the address to the passenger (“We’re going to 300 North Elm St, right?”) and then when approaching the destination, checking the best spot to drop off especially if it’s on a busy street (“Should I drop you off at the corner here or do you want me to stop further up?”).
If the driver doesn’t confirm the address, the passenger should too and not just blithely assume that a) they got in the right Uber b) they put the right address into the app c) there were no issues with Uber translating the inputted address to the driver’s app.
If the driver has not yet ended the ride, which again generally speaking happens when the passenger gets out of the car, the passenger can update the destination in their app at any time and it instantly updates on the driver’s app. It’s cheaper to do that than to request a new ride, as Uber fees are calculated on a base fee + per mile charge + per minute charge.
I hadn’t realized that the passenger could update the destination. So there really should be no issue unless the passenger was just completely zoned out and had no idea where they were going.
I tried to find the outcome via a Google News search, but unfortunately “uber driver get out of my car” doesn’t narrow things down far enough. This story appears to be about it, but only reports what’s in the video.
IMO, though, a cab driver at least would have been happy to change the drop off point from the hospital administration building to the ED, or would have driven directly to the ED if that’s what the passenger requested verbally. (In some hospitals, it can be quite a distance from one part of the campus to another.)
I’m guessing they reached their original destination, the driver ended the ride, and then the passenger refused to request a new ride and had been sufficiently hostile that the driver didn’t want to grant that courtesy. If the ride was still active, pretty much any Uber driver would take the passenger across the campus to the other location.
One other potential consideration is Uber can “stack” ride requests for a driver. If a ride is nearing its destination and a new rider is requesting a ride very close to that destination, the driver-with-a-passenger can get the request first instead of Uber routing it to a free driver that’s further away. The passenger gets a notification of “Your driver is dropping off a previous passenger” as long as the first ride is still active, and when that first ride ends they’re told “Your driver is on his way.” If that was the same in this situation, then you have a driver who has another passenger waiting for them while the first passenger refuses to get out of the car, and as far as the second passenger can tell, the driver is just taking a nap and not coming to get them as requested.
So if I’m an older person, headed for the first time, for some tests at a hospital I’ve never been to before say, and I give the address I’ve been given, only to discover on arrival I am at the wrong entrance and need to go around the block, my driver can put me and my walker out in the rain?
(Because he has another fare ‘stacked’ perhaps? Or at his discretion?)
I could see this happening to seniors pretty easily. It’s happened to me before.
Okay… Unless the driver was severely mentally ill, nobody just starts screaming like that for no reason. And her passive-aggressive bullshit innocent-lost-in-the-woods act was clearly trolling him - not to mention performing for the camera. There has to be some kind of context that is missing for this. As others have pointed out, her reaction is entirely irrational. If you are stuck in the car with someone who is enraged and screaming, any sane human being is going to want to run away as fast as possible. They aren’t going to just sit there in the car and continue to antagonize him.
It seems to me that the driver’s only fault is that he lost his temper instead of just calmly dumping her ass on the sidewalk (and calling the cops if she refused to leave). If you are going to take a job like that, you have to be prepared to deal with the loonies, the criminals, and the con artists.
It could happen with a conventional taxi. The recourse there is contacting the taxi company to resolve the situation. They have incentive to do so as the taxi driver is an employee, whereas for Uber they draw a bright big “independent contractor” line around the driver and claim that they are merely a technology company, not a transportation company, and all they’ve done is put you in contact with someone who will take you where you want to go for money. If you don’t like your Uber driver, Uber will generally try to make things right but always have the trump card of “that driver isn’t our employee.”
Uber undercuts traditional taxis in fares, and one of the reasons they are able to do this is they are (generally) not covered by the same regulations as conventional taxis. There are positives and negatives to it being a disruptive entrant to an ossified industry and those aren’t really in scope here.
The driver’s incentive in your hypothetical would be the driver rating and basic human morality. If I’m an Uber driver and I’ve got a little old lady being taken to church on a Sunday morning, and she puts in the address on the wrong side of the parking lot, I’ll take her over there because I’m not a monster. And even if I were a monster, a 1 rating (on a 1-5 scale) can counteract a lot of other good ratings.
The reason for that is, depending on geographic location, drivers have a minimum rating threshold that they must maintain. This isn’t the same countrywide as different places have different rating practices – for example, and speaking in very broad brushes, a driver might only have to maintain a 4.3 in San Fran because entitled coastal elites expect pampering on a ride and doors held open for them to give a 5-star rating, but a driver in Omaha might have to maintain a 4.6 because those ol’ midwestern people are just so gosh-darn nice and appreciative that they always hand out those 5-star ratings like candy.
So if a driver has to maintain an overall 4.5 rating, getting a single 1-star rating would take 8 5-star ratings for the average rating over those 9 rides to be above 4.5 (8 * 5 +1 = 41, 41/9 = 4.55). If a driver doesn’t maintain their rating for their location, they can be disabled from accessing the driver app.
At this point it was simply a power struggle. She requested to be taken to the “Emergency Room” he delivered her to the address on the GPS. However, the address for the ER was main door for the hospital. If these were two people acting civil with each other, he probably would have just driven her around to the ER. However, with all the yelling and screaming on his end and the 'I don’t know where I am, where am I" on her end, it turned into him saying ‘this is the address…hop out’ and her acting like a baby.
While he was probably in the wrong for yelling at her like that, I’m going to guess he was in the right for calling the police when she wouldn’t vacate the car when asked. He could even tell her that she seems ‘very confused…she keeps asking me where she is’. Oooh, better, maybe he should have run and and requested medical help for her, she was clearly suffering from something.
Both people are behaving pretty badly. I’m inclined to say that the driver, for all his volume, is behaving less badly than the passenger, who’s clearly being a dick and trying to bait his anger.
What the driver should have done is just parked and called the police. Or, better, an ambulance. Which would have been a great comeuppance, since she’d get to the ER quickly as she claimed to need and would probably have to pay a hefty ambulance fee.