My son’s death is proof Uber is unsafe
City council lowered standards instead of raising them
In 2016, Toronto City Council voted to eliminate the driver training that had long been a requirement for licensing taxi and limousine drivers in this town. It is time to bring it back.
At the time, council was simply trying to regulate ride-hailing companies, specifically Uber, which had been operating illegally in the city. The city’s Municipal Licensing and Standards committee had recommended extending mandatory safety training to ride share drivers. Mayor John Tory had enough pledged votes to get that legislation through.
But Uber didn’t want safety training. And having already bullied its way into the Toronto market, Uber was prepared to bully some more, pulling safety standards down, rather than stepping up.
Uber, it seemed, had the mayor’s ear. Literally overnight, after a bloody bit of backroom lobbying, votes were scraped together from the mayor’s allies on council. Progressive councillors were told to take a hike and training was eliminated for everyone.
The response was immediate. The day the new bylaw passed, long lines of wannabe cab drivers snaked outside the MLS offices at city hall, to buy their “free” $130 taxi license. The line included people who had previously failed the mandatory taxi course, taking advantage of the mayor’s no-training bylaw.
Council had lowered standards according to the Uber playbook, instead of raising them in the interest of the public it was elected to serve. And it remains that way today, pending a revision of the bylaw expected later this year.
The spectacular, almost criminal, folly of this retreat was played out on the Gardiner Expressway last March 21, when my 28-year-old son, Nicholas Cameron, was killed in the back seat of an Uber vehicle while travelling to Pearson airport with his girlfriend.
The 23-year-old Uber driver didn’t know how to get to the airport, driving east at first from Parkdale, then west. He was tentative behind the wheel, especially on the highway. And when his phone dropped to the floor, he pulled his car over to a stop, partially in a live lane of traffic. Then, without looking, he angled his car back into traffic, directly into the path of an oncoming BMW.
The coroner told us Nick was killed instantly in that crash, his neck broken. Recently, the driver had his license suspended for one year and was fined $1,000. He left the courthouse beaming from ear to ear, and climbed into his brother’s car, which bore an Uber sticker.
While emergency workers were still prying Nick out of the wreckage, a computer-generated email from Uber landed in his inbox, asking him to rate his driver “experience” — 5 stars or one — and suggesting he add a tip.
The email would be the only time Uber initiated official contact with anyone in our family in the wake of Nick’s death. A day or two later, when the seriousness of the situation had sunk in, the driver was cut off from the Uber app and Nick’s usage history was erased. That’s it.
Uber says it cares deeply about safety. It is only prepared to go so far, however, to ensure it for you and me and the people we love.
Last September, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi came to Toronto to announce a $200-million-dollar investment by Uber in self-driving car research here, over five years. At the same time, Uber was in talks to acquire its largest competitor in the Middle East, Careem, for $2 to $2.5 billion US. Ride-sharing, for now, remains at the heart of Uber’s business. Don’t get distracted by flying taxis and e-scooters.
The day of Khosrowshahi’s visit, a documentary crew from CBC’s The Fifth Estate followed up on a long-standing request for five minutes of the CEO’s time to sit down and talk about safety in the wake of Nick’s death. They were left to chase after him, calling out their questions, only to have doors literally shut in their face. No one from Uber would talk to them.
The same day, Khosrowshahi agreed to give me a few minutes of his time, alone. I had approached Uber late the previous night, identified myself and asked for some facetime, since I already planned on attending his speech to the Toronto Board of Trade. His sympathy, as the father of four, was genuine. But he visibly clenched on the question of driver training, and questioned “whether taxi and ride-share drivers really need training.” Still, he promised to give it some thought.
In December, Toronto City Council, in a unanimous vote, called for the reinstatement of safety training, to be applied equally to ride-share, taxi and limo drivers. But at a media “briefing” on Jan. 28 to announce Uber’s 2019 plans for Canada, the topic of safety training had to be raised by questioning reporters in the room, not Uber.
Uber Canada General Manager Rob Khazzam said no one cares more about safety than Uber, but warned there will be consequences — more expensive rides, fewer drivers signing on if the company is frogmarched by the city into mandatory driver safety training for its drivers. Uber is still having trouble finding the level playing field.
As for what kind of training council should be looking at, there are choices. Taxi drivers were once required to take a 17-day course, which, surprisingly, did not include any in-car testing. Training for limousine drivers ran five days.
Centennial College, the largest transportation training facility in Canada, currently offers TAXI-100, a 25-hour course for taxi drivers, which includes mapping, customer service and sensitivity training and a full day of in-car defensive training. Fail the in-car portion and you fail the entire course. Driving skills are critical. Centennial’s part-time studies department says it could easily design an effective driver safety course tailored for Toronto’s for-hire drivers in consultation with the city.
Any course council approves must include defensive driving and cannot rely exclusively on online instruction. The city also must take control of the issue and annual renewal of more than 70,000 private transportation company driver permits currently in circulation. Renewals must hinge on proof of safety training.
Currently, the ride-share companies handle all the necessary paperwork and just send in renewal fees on behalf of drivers year after year. They also decide who to contract to do their security checks, while taxi and limo drivers in Toronto are vetted by our police. That must also be addressed.
In the 10 months since Nick’s death, our family has received a lot of support from every quarter in our quest for driver training — except from Uber itself. We feel that what happened to Nick was a textbook case of everything that could go wrong for any ride share passenger.
We can gauge the true measure of Uber’s engagement in safety, as evidenced by Uber’s continuous generation of innovative ideas related to transportation, none of which include training the people behind the wheel. It is not “at the heart of everything we do,” as Khosrowshahi proclaimed in ads released just weeks after Nick’s death. Nor is Uber working hard to become “synonymous with safety.” Uber is using safety as window dressing.
Making money and attracting investors for an upcoming IPO is at the heart of everything it does and the Nicholas Camerons of the world, the Arizona pedestrian mowed down by a self-driving car, the thousands of sexual assault victims and the ordinary passengers with tales of harrowing rides with directionally challenged ride-share drivers are mere roadkill on the highway to transportation dominance.
When Uber asks us to imagine the possibilities, I personally get shivers up my spine. Every day of my life I live with what could go wrong when safety is weighed against profitability.