Thanks (but no thanks), Uber, for the helpful tips on “how to not get raped” en route, but we think there’s a better solution.
by Candace Mittel
illustration by Grace Molteni
Cholonda had long dreadlocks bunched together in one thick rubber band beneath a gray beanie. She looked to be about 40, maybe 45, and she showed up in a black Jeep Wrangler with the sweet smell of coffee and a gentle grin, both of which had the unbelievable effect of mollifying the state of anxiety I had found myself in that Monday morning.
It all started when I woke up before my alarm and, through the tiny crevices of my Delta Airlines eye mask, could discern that it was quite bright in my room. Strange, I thought to myself. I get up at six every morning, a good 40 minutes before the Chicago winter sunrise. How could it already be light out? I tossed my eye mask aside, stretched my dopey limbs and took a quick peek at my phone. With horror, I saw the lit screen. I blinked a few times, hoping to wipe it away, but it was still there: 7:11 am. Beneath it, several missed phone calls and texts from my carpool mates who pick me up promptly at 6:45 each morning.
With no car and no public transportation to the school where I work in the suburbs, about a one-hour drive north, I opened my Lyft app. A few minutes later, Cholonda’s encircled avatar, a nice, chirpy one, popped up. Good, I can ride with her. I was relieved that I got a woman on my first try.
I was clearly distressed when I entered the car, but about three-quarters of the way through our ride together, Cholonda told me that “today is going to be a good day.” I didn’t respond. “Oooh, I can just feel it,” she hummed. She then handed me a cup of Dunkin Donut glazed munchkins. “They’re all yours.” I ate all six and thanked her for the breakfast before hopping out of the car. I ran to the first period math class I teach, miraculously only 10 minutes late.
Although she’ll never know it, in many ways, Cholonda was my savior that Monday morning. In fact, I have had many Lyft saviors (although they didn’t all include donuts and motivational phrases). These are times when I am running late or it’s minus 15 degrees with windchill (yes, living right along Lake Michigan is a joy in the winter), and I just need to take a car (rather than train or bus) to make it to my destination on time or without frostbite. There was Chizoba, an aspiring healthcare worker, who brought me to my Friday night Shabbat meal right as the sun was setting. Then there was Kia, a recent college grad, who brought me back to my apartment to tutor a student just in time. Along the way I learned that she was planning on starting an after-school basketball program for girls. Jeanette took me a long way (57 minutes) from my apartment to the airport when I had to fly home, unexpectedly, for my grandmother’s funeral. Jeanette just so happened to be a caregiver and shared stories about her patients as I shared stories about my grandmother’s last years with Alzheimer’s. Ann, a divorced mother of two, who told me her ex-husband was an “asshole” for cheating on her, saved me 45 minutes on a train, and Annette, a bride-to-be, was on her way to go running along the lake and decided to pick me up and take me home on her way to the lakefront.
If you haven’t noticed, there is a common thread among all my Lyft saviors; they are all women. And no, it’s not just luck of the draw. It’s strategy and quite a bit of inconvenience—after all, it’s not the easiest of tasks to hail a female Lyft driver. Some might see it as sexism, and perhaps I am committing acts of unfair discrimination against male drivers, but it’s more likely a result of a culture in which, unfortunately, women can’t always feel safe doing certain activities alone. In fact, I’m angry at myself for even crafting that sentence: “feel safe” is an ameliorating figure of speech which trivializes the whole situation to a feeling inside a woman’s head, a feeling, which is a state of mind and not a reality. So I’m going to recant: my insistence on riding with a female driver is most likely a result of a culture in which, unfortunately, women are not always safe to do certain activities alone.
Let’s rewind a bit, to a time before Smartphones, before Lyfts and Ubers and Sidecars, when we travelled in expensive taxis from one bar to the next, from the movies to a friend’s place. At that time, I had so many frightening experiences riding in taxis alone in Chicago, especially at night, that I had come to take it as the norm. Most of the “frightening experiences” consisted of drivers asking me inappropriate questions or speaking to me in an inappropriate manner. If you’re a woman, I most certainly don’t need to spell it out for you, but just to be clear, some of these series of harassments included a driver asking me if I liked to dance, if I’ve ever tried stripping—“you should really try it”—and another inquiring, relentlessly, about my sex life—“do you have a boyfriend? Do you have sex with your boyfriend? Do you like to have sex?” Perhaps you may be thinking that “frightening” isn’t the proper adjective here, and that I was never in any real physical danger, but let me tell you, to be pursued in this manner, even verbally, for an entire 40 minutes from the airport to my apartment is indeed disturbing, upsetting, and frightening.
In all of these cases, I had no choice but to keep riding along with the creepy taxi driver, so I would clutch my bag, text my mom or roommate the cab driver’s number, all the while keeping one hand on my pepper-spray keychain, annoyed at myself for never having practiced spraying it before. When I would finally get close to my apartment, I would tell the driver to stop down the street from my place. As Rachel Perkins writes in xojane, recalling her own horrifying taxi experience in New York City last year: “‘It’s near here,’ I said. I didn’t want to tell him exactly which building I was staying in. These are the instincts we all adapt as women, and that we hate ourselves for adapting.”
And although taxis are, for the most part, a safe means of transportation (in fact, according to one study, taxi and livery-cab drivers have crash rates one-third lower than other drivers out on the roads), the following stories may shock you: Montreal police are advising women to stop taking taxis alone in the city following a series of sexual assault cases (at least 29 cases in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, a neighborhood in Montreal, in 2013 and at least 17 in 2014); a Brooklyn cab driver was recently convicted of raping a 29-year-old female passenger three years ago; in the summer of 2013, a woman reported her rape and assault after being picked up by an unregistered taxi in Newton, MA; there is currently an ongoing testimony for a Michigan taxi cab driver accused of raping his female customer at gunpoint; a cab driver was arrested a few months ago in Fort Lauderdale after raping his female passenger in an empty parking lot.
I couldn’t find any statistics or data regarding the number of sexual assaults occurring specifically in taxis and city cabs, but I cited the handful of stories that made the news to suggest that sexual assault and harassment in taxis is more common than one may think, especially considering the fact that around 68 percent of sexual assaults are not even reported to police.
Another xojane writer, Emily, describes her sexual assault in a NYC cab a few years back and elucidates the situation’s particular danger: “I’ve [only] been touched once, but I’ve been propositioned and harassed countless times, by drivers like the one who told me hopefully, ‘You know, sometimes girls show me their boobs. Hasn’t happened in a while though…’ Or the man who wouldn’t stop pestering me to explain why a beautiful young woman like me would possibly not be married already. Alone in that car with a bored, lonely man, you often become the perfect victim — one who can’t get away.”
One who can’t get away… perhaps that’s the eeriest, most vulnerable detail of the situation, which distinguishes it from other situations with creepy men in more public/escapable spaces (your boss or colleague in the office, your waiter at lunch, your bartender on Saturday night, etc.) When a maintenance man approaches you while you are eating lunch alone in a common room at work (“you eat so beautifully”), you can simply pack up your sandwich and go back to your desk (an instance which did, indeed, happen to me recently).
Perkins’ article ends with a point I want to echo: “Almost every city-dwelling woman I know…has a story about feeling unsafe or being legitimately harmed by a cab driver. I’m not here to claim, in any way, that all cab drivers are predators or criminals…or that there are no dangerous women out there, but I am here to say that I would probably feel safer in 99.99999 percent of taxi situations if my driver was a woman.”
Amen. All of this to explain why I was the first to scratch the taxi system and hop on the rideshare bandwagon (Lyft, Uber, Sidecar, and Hailo, but I only use Lyft since there are some unresolved questions about mysogyny at Uber) because being able to scope my driver (name, picture, car, average rating) before I’m committed and riding along (which most rideshare apps allow), is an indispensable safety feature. I can essentially, if I have enough time and patience, choose my driver.
I have set up two rules for myself. One, always go with my gut instinct. Two, never ride alone with a male driver at night. Practically, this is how it plays out: If I’m taking a Lyft during the day, I will cancel a male driver (at no cost if it’s within the first five minutes) if I see that he has an average of 4.7/5 stars or below. There is simply no reason to have such low ratings. If even one person thought he was rude, inappropriate, or a poor/dangerous driver, I have no desire to ride in that man’s car. I will also cancel a ride if I get a bad vibe from the man’s picture. “I feel it in my bones,” as my grandmother would say. Say I’m profiling or stereotyping based on smug or disheveled looks, or just too many muscles (I admit I am more inclined to ride with a tiny, thin looking man than a strong, meaty-looking one) but when it comes to my safety, as a five-foot-six, 115 pound, 23-year-old female hopping in a strange male’s car, I will go with my gut, even if it’s wrong. I would rather hurt the feelings of ten thousand men than get sexually assaulted, which, unfortunately, is also happening in Ubers and Lyfts.
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If you’re wondering if I hold the same standards for my female drivers, the honest answer is no. I will ride with any woman, no matter what, which you may claim is unfair. Theoretically, I would cancel a female driver if she had low ratings or gave me a bad feeling, but neither of those cases has ever come up for me. Perhaps I subconsciously remind myself that there are only a tiny percentage of female sex criminals. In fact, 99 percent of sex offenders in single-victim incidents are male, so maybe I know that I’m statistically safe with a female driver. Or perhaps it’s something intuitive, an instinctual fellowship and attachment to my female drivers that surpasses the bounds of reason or verbal articulation. Who can be sure? Either way, I’m surely not alone, or even a minority, in this feeling.
If I need to get somewhere at night, I will only ride with a female driver. This poses some issues since the ratio of male to female Lyft drivers is not 50-50. Spokeswoman for Lyft, Katie Dally, estimated that one-third of its drivers nationwide are women. I should point out, however, that this is significantly better than city cabs, which is almost exclusively male (only 1 percent of yellow cab drivers are women and 5 percent of all for-hire drivers of livery cars, green cabs, limos and luxury sedans are women).
Despite the better odds with Lyft, I still often spend 20 to 30 minutes ordering and then canceling rides until I land a female driver. Tired of this tedious process (and feeling guilty for all the male drivers who were getting canceled on because of me), I sent an e-mail to Lyft:
SEP 21, 2014 | 11:24AM PDT
Original message
Candace wrote:
Hi– I’ve recently been using Lyft quite a bit. But as a young woman riding at night, I much prefer to ride with a female driver. Is there a way you can choose your preference? I would really appreciate this feature. Because instead, if I’m riding alone at night, I just cancel my rides until I get a female driver, which is not such an efficient way of dealing with this.
Thanks,
Candace
Less than 2 weeks later, I received this reply from Lillian G:
OCT 03, 2014 | 10:54PM PDT
Lillian G. replied:
Hi Candace,
Thank you for reaching out to us with your concerns about safety in the Lyft community and getting a female driver. As it turns out, we do not currently have a feature to request drivers by gender. Lyft’s top priority at all times is the safety, trust and happiness of community members, be they passengers or drivers. With these goals in mind we’ve built many safety features into the app itself:
– Lyft uses a third-party service that masks both driver and passenger phone numbers
– Since rides are tracked via GPS, we always know where each driver and passenger is in real-time.
– Passengers are able to leave feedback immediately following a ride using the app.
– If a passenger or driver rate each other three stars or below they will never get matched up again.
– Community members are able to contact the support team directly and quickly through the app.
All drivers go through a screening process which includes a criminal background check that is more strict[sic] than what is required for California limo and taxi drivers. Additionally, they go through an interview process to ensure they are the right fit for the Lyft community. We perform regular community assessments to ensure that drivers (and passengers) meet our requirements.
You can read more about Lyft Safety here: http://www.lyft.com/safety
If you have any ideas of how to make the community safer, please let us know!
Although I appreciate the speedy and lengthy reply, evidence of an efficient customer service team, as well as the noted safety features of the company—all good processes—Lyft is making a huge mistake by not taking my concern seriously because it is one shared by millions of female riders. Thankfully, SheTaxis, a New York City taxi company, has already recognized this. SheTaxis is capitalizing on the root of the problem (namely, that in the taxi industry, women comprise a tiny percentage of drivers but the majority of riders—at least 60 percent, if not more) and has created a taxi service for women only (that goes for drivers and passengers).
You might be surprised to learn that SheTaxis’ founder, Stella Mateo, is married to the founder of the New York State Federation of Taxi Drivers (a group with over 30,000 drivers). Or you might think that it makes perfect sense given her experience and familiarity, as a woman, with the taxi industry. Mateo told the Times that her service would have been useful when her daughters were growing up; she would have liked a female taxi driver to help safely drive them to sports practices and other extracurricular activities. But she sees her service’s benefits as twofold: it’s also “a way to help women join an industry that has long been dominated by men.”
SheTaxis is currently only in NYC and is also experiencing some legal setbacks. According to discrimination law experts, the service most likely conflicts with federal and local sex-discrimination statutes, which probably explains Lyft’s lack of plans to implement such a feature in their app. But if and as soon as SheTaxis expands to Chicago, I will absolutely ditch Lyft, and most women I know would do the same. This could be a grave punch to Lyft and other rideshares since women are the majority of these companies’ customers. SheTaxis, as claimed on the company’s website, provides an unbeatable amenity to women: “We give you what no other taxi or black car service can provide: peace of mind.”
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Candace Mittel is a recent graduate of Northwestern University where she studied Mathematics, Jewish Studies and Creative Writing Nonfiction (and no, they are not connected, but she’s open to suggestions). She currently lives in Chicago and teaches/encourages students to love math. Candace enjoys listening/singing to the Les Mis soundtrack and eating a superbly ripe avocado or mango. Read more of her feature work for The Riveter here and see more of her writing on her website Jerusalem Medley.
Grace Molteni is a Midwest born and raised designer, illustrator, and self-proclaimed bibliophile, currently calling Chicago home. For more musings, work, or just to say hey check her out on Instagram or at her personal website.
