Interview: Are Uber's safety measures effective enough to transform taxi services?

Uber has introduced a range of safety initiatives in India, leveraging a combination of technology and women-centric features. The measures include seat belt alarms, live agent support, and an in-app emergency button for riders and drivers.

The Hindustan Times speaks to Sooraj Nair, Head Safety Operations India & South Asia to understand how effective are the features and discuss a range of issues associating with the taxi service giant.

How have present technologies improved the safety of taxi services in India?

We use a combination of both tech as well as human interventions to make sure that every ride is as safe as possible. And today with the help of tech, we are actually able to focus on user safety before, during and after each trip in ways that have never been possible before.

Brief us about recent safety initiatives taken by Uber

Seat belt alarm: Each time as a rider when you start an Uber ride, you will get an in-app notification and an audio alert will also play on the driver's phone, reminding you to buckle in. The feature is currently live for users in Hyderabad. India actually is the first country where Uber is piloting the use of a human voice and along with the in-app notification to remind riders.

Live agent support: We understand how important it is to speak to a live agent versus just a bot in a safety situation. And hence, we actually have a 24*7 safety helpline with just the push of a button. Users can easily connect to highly trained safety support agents based out of twin centres in Hyderabad and Vizag.

An in-app emergency button: If the rider or the driver is in a state of emergency, they can click on the SOS button and then they will get connected to the nearest police station and get police help. Our team also gets to know about the situation and they intervene to provide any sort of safety support that is necessary to deescalate the situation.

I would like you to also elaborate on some women-centric safety features

We partnered with a leading NGO in the gender equality space to gender sensitise more than 1,30,000 drivers on the platform.

Secondly, there is RideCheck, first introduced in 2019, to detect unusually long stops while a trip is ongoing. We just last year expanded the capabilities of our RideCheck technology to detect when a trip takes an unexpected route or when it ends unexpectedly before the rider's final destination. Our system detects an anomaly or a possible issue with the trip, both the rider and the driver will receive a RideCheck notification to check if everything is all right or not. And they can let us know through the app if everything is fine, or they can also take other actions like using the in-app emergency button or reporting the issue on Uber safety line.

Is Uber also looking to include women drivers in its fleet for boosting the safety?

We definitely would want to increase the participation of women drivers on the platform. And hence, yes, I think we do need to work on making sure that women drivers also feel safe.

One of the things that women drivers want is to have the choice to take trips from all riders or do they only want trips from female riders? This is something which we are currently testing out and we can see an update or such services in the future.

However, our policies and our standards and the way that we deal with incidents is completely agnostic of who raises the incident, it's agnostic of gender, etc.

What are the safety issues in bike-sharing services? And how can the issue be best solved?

If you compare bike with car, it's more prone to accidents. So we need to make sure that road safety incidents come down on bikes? And there are two ways, essentially, that we are at least addressing this.

Proactive: We figure out if a driver's driving pattern is safe, if a driver is driving within speed limits, if the driver is not engaged in having hard brakes or hard accelerations, etc.

Reactive: Here we actually get feedback from riders that they felt that a certain trip would have been more safe.

Based on these signals we take a call on whether we need to educate drivers, whether we need to inform them that they need to change their behaviour, or eventually in the worst case, if we need to deactivate their account and bar their access off the platform.

The bike-sharing services are often criticised for lack of sufficient checks of drivers?

We do not differentiate how a driver gets onboarded, whether it is on a two wheeler, three wheeler or a four wheeler product. Our onboarding checks, background checks are the same across all products. We follow the same background verification process. And if we find that a driver has a criminal background associated with him or her, we do not let the driver drive on the platform.

How would Uber react on allegations the fare is increased if user's mobile phone has low battery?

The Uber official categorically denied the allegations and shared the company's global response on it.

“Uber does not take into account the phone’s battery level to calculate the price of a trip. The dynamic pricing applied to trips booked via Uber is determined by the existing demand for rides and the supply of drivers who can respond to it,” the statement reads.