Did You Know Your Uber Driver Can Get You Shadow-Banned from Uber?

LITTLE KNOWN FACT ABOUT UBER: A recent discussion on Right Angle talked about people's reluctance to give a bad rating to our Uber drivers. Yes, we get to rate the drivers and that can be an attractive way for jerks to harm their drivers.  We decent folks are therefore reluctant to trash drivers with one and two star reviews for fear of costing them their jobs. But Uber drivers are not defenseless. Did you know that UBER DRIVERS ALSO RATE THEIR PASSENGERS?

Several low ratings by passengers can get an Uber Driver removed from the list. So we have good reason to be careful not to overreact when we rate a driver. Who wants to get a guy fired (anyone who is not an entitled, drunk on power, #$$#()|& that is)? But the little-known fact is, that Uber drivers rate their passengers and several low ratings can leave you stranded because drivers won't pick up passengers with a low rating.

I got a message from Uber several months ago that a driver had given me a low rating. Uber then proceeded to give me a lecture about wearing a mask in their cars. I investigated further and found that the driver had burned me because I got into the car from outside and forgot to put on my mask. Instead of reminding me to do so, which would have got him an apology and my instant compliance with Uber's mask mandate, he remained in a sullen silence the whole trip and then low rated me afterward.

Needless to say I reciprocated vis-a-vis giving him a low rating and expressing my opinion to his bosses. Instead of giving me a polite reminder about the mask and protected me from the vile streams of CoVid virus spewing from my nostrils as I breathed, he clearly jumped to the conclusion that my noncompliance was due to me being a Republican White Supremacist conspiracy theorist who might commit violence against him in his car in the midst of a deadly pandemic. These people make me so tired!

To their credit, the Uber system does allow you to protest the low rating by contacting their customer service and giving your side of the incident. It also allows drivers to warn other drivers that this passenger is bad news. That makes for a more friendly environment for both drivers and passengers. In all of the hundreds of rides I've taken with Uber I've only had that one problem and the trouble erupted after the ride was over and I was safely home.

Uber has a good system, but knowing the driver gets a vote on how well you behave as a passenger should probably be more widely known among riders. It might result in a lot more self-restraint among their riders. I've driven a taxi so I know how much I appreciated the polite people I carried in my cab. Met some of the nicest drunks that way. They used to hand me their wallets and say, "Take what you need!" at the end of the trip. I never cheated them, not gave myself even a tip as they were too impaired to make that sort of decision. And I couldn't even rate my riders, nor could they rate me. This was Ft. Worth, Texas after all and people tend to gravitate toward nice by and large in those parts.

The closest any of us ever got to being able to rate our passengers was by throwing them out of our cab. One driver (not me) picked up a drunk at Felix Bar in downtown Ft. Worth late one night. The driver got pulled off the cab stand at the Hyatt where most of the riders are headed for the airport or are great tippers so he wasn't in a mood to put up with much from a $3 fare. The drunk he picked up immediately got surly because the barkeeper had cut him off and he somehow got it into his head that the barkeep was in cahoots with the cab driver. He began threatening the driver and shouting threats at him from the back seat. The guy was driving one of those old yellow Checker cabs with the flat back floorboard that made for easy egress. So anyway, the guy was sitting on the right side of the back seat, leaning against the door as he berated the driver. So when they reached 7th Street, my fellow driver made a sharp left hand turn onto 7th and mid-turn, reached back and flipped open the back door and let centrifugal force do the rest.

His increasingly violent passenger, rolled limply out the door and onto 7th Street, one of Ft. Worth's busiest thoroughfares. The cab disappeared into the night leaving the drunk in the middle of the street in a puddle of his own vomit. Fortunately, at that time of night, the street was pretty empty so no one ran over him. 

The driver, in effect, rated him 0, GONE, and canceled.The drunk meanwhile couldn't identify the driver or even remember where he was picked up and why. Driving a cab was hazardous enough without having someone sitting behind you threatening violence. We often had to come up with some creative solutions to avoid problems, but we essentially had little or no choice as to who we picked up.

I personally think Uber's system is much better. It is a close to insuring everyone behaves themselves and provides both members of the ride-share transaction with means to defend themselves and as Robert A. Heinlein once said, "An armed society is a polite society."

© 2023 by Tom King