Uber Technologies Inc. Chief Executive Dara Khosrowshahi has responded to the company’s safety report released Dec. 5 by saying in an interview that the sexual assaults were a “reflection on society.”

The report found that 3,045 sexual assaults occurred in its vehicles in 2018, up slightly from 2,936 in 2017. Adjusted for increased ride growth, the figure was down 16%. One fact glossed over in many media reports is that nearly half of the figure involved passengers assaulting drivers.

“It’s a big number when you first see it, and it’s still a big number. There’s no getting used to 3,000 reports of assault,” Khosrowshahi told the Washington Post. “Now, that’s within the context of billions of rides, and 99.9 percent of our rides start and finish without any kind of incident.”

Khosrowshahi added that the first step for the company is to be as open as possible about safety issues. “Transparency drives accountability and then accountability drives action,” he said.

Pushed in the interview over sexual assaults in Uber vehicles not being reported to police, Khosrowshahi noted that doing so is up to the victim. Safety measures Uber is taking were also discussed, including trials of audio and video recording of rides.

The alarm over the numbers caused Uber’s share price to drop 2.8% Friday, not helped by commentary such as this: “This is a major crisis situation that they’re going to have to deal with because the brand’s built on safety, and even though some could try to say it’s a small number, it’s still way too high — it’s higher than zero — and I think that shows a gap in their screening process,” Dan Ives, managing director of Wedbush Securities, told ABC.

Although Ives is right to some extent — any number other than zero is too many when it comes sexual assaults — the way this is being pinned as an Uber problem is part of broader push, led particularly by the taxi industry, to paint Uber in a bad light. As The Associated Press reported in 2016, it’s difficult to compare the safety of Uber to taxis because “police and transportation authorities around the U.S. say they know of no rigorous comparison of cabbies and Uber drivers.”

What is known is that sexual assaults happen regularly in taxis. In several reports related to specific locations in the U.S. and Canada, it’s known that sexual assault by taxi drivers were increasing as recently as 2016.

How many or how frequently taxi drivers are being assaulted and robbed is unknown. A 2005 study from the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing called “The Problem of Robbery of Taxi Drivers” noted is that “most police departments do not record the circumstances surrounding a robbery incident in a way that allows taxi robberies to be identified easily.”

So the central question remains: Are Uber’s numbers higher than general rates of alternative transport, therefore making its rides less safe?

The main crime here may be Uber’s transparency compared with that of the taxi industry. In attempting to tackle the issue by sharing the numbers, it has exposed itself to criticism. As the report noted, 0.0003% of all Uber trips in the U.S. had a report of a “critical safety incident.” The headline number may be high but the percentage chance of an serious incident is clearly low.

Photo: automobileitalia/ Flickr