At some point in everyone’s life, there’s one word he or she is afraid of. At age 4, it might be “spanking.” During one’s first week of parochial school, it’s probably “Satan.” Or with mean nuns, it could be “ruler.” In one’s first week in prison, it’s probably “Rape.”
Many companies have a word they’re afraid of. For many, its “competition.” For others, it may be “bankruptcy.” For Lyft, that word is “Fatigue.” That is because fatigue is the one word they disregard, recklessly. It is the one concept that their business model doesn’t care about. But it’s the one concept that costs them the most in court. “Fatigue.”
An old T.V. show of my childhood (I think it was Dragnet), began every episode with something like this. “In New York City, there are 8 million stories. This is one of them” This post is certain to be one of quite a few stories about Lyft.
Ownership
The essence of Lyft (and Uber) is that they claim to not be transportation services. They pretend to be brokers – and try to convince their victims (and their lawyers) that they are only matchmakers. After all, they don’t even own any of the vehicles their customers travel in. And popular wisdom is that their drivers use their own vehicles. The trouble is, that is not necessarily true.
Trying to shed themselves of liability, and everything else, Lyft tries to also shed itself of insurance costs. (While their drivers are “at work,” Lyft calls this “being on the platform,” and Lyft’s insurance covers you for your mayhem, no matter how bad it is.) But to get around this, and further to provide an incentive for its drivers to work as many hours as they can stay marginally awake for, Lyft has made arrangements with rental car companies to rent vehicles to certain drivers. In fact, rental car companies who participate in this scheme (or scam) have a specially selected group of vehicles just for these car renters. My guess – I don’t use this word or this concept when testifying – is that these are relatively new, still shiny cars that have been in an accident or two — accidents that might show up on “Carfax,” thereby lowering their sales values. This is important to car rental companies, as they often sell their cars after about two years of service.
Anyway, the fact is that all Lyft drivers do not drive their own cars. For a while, many rented them from Hertz. But pretty soon, Hertz had enough: The carnage, the insurance pay-outs and the repair costs from Lyft drivers were gobbling up their profits. Shortly before my last lawsuit, as an expert witness, against Lyft, Hertz had defaulted to Avis. (Not Jay Leno’s wife – even though Jay is a “car guy,” and has a car show on T.V.). Avis: The car rental company no one has ever heard about.
One week, Avis rented one of its thousands of specially selected cars to Lyft drivers. At the time of that lawsuit against Lyft, the rental fee was $200/week. Plus Avis paid for routine maintenance. And insurance. Great for both Lyft, and Lyft drivers – or almost great. But here was the catch: If a Lyft driver provided 150 trips a week, Lyft paid for the rental. Whoopee! But if the driver provided only 149 trips that week, the driver paid Avis $200.
Now, imagine yourself as a Lyft driver operating a rental car (which may or may not still be an Avis car). You had a great week. With 35 cups of coffee and a lot of good luck, you had a great week, providing more than 20 trips a day, working all seven days. And to make money, of course, these weren’t a bunch of short, midday trips to the corner store. They included a lot of trips to the airport (where you often had to wait in line to obtain a “fare” (who was also waiting in line). And some of your 100-plus hours of driving involved rush hour traffic. So here you are: Your week is almost over, and you had a bonanza of a week. But you have only 45 minutes left, you provided 149 trips, and you can hardly keep your eyes open: Over the past several nights, you snapped in half at least 10 toothpicks, helping you keep them open. But in the next 45 minutes, if you don’t get one more “fare,” you’ll be paying the car rental company $200. If you do, your car (this past week) will cost you nothing.
Now, particularly in modern America with a distribution of wealth unlike anything the world has ever known – about 1000 to 1500 multi-billionaires, a rapidly shrinking middle class that you, a Lyft driver, will never be part of, and mostly a country full of about 330,000,000 poor people (who do not think of themselves as poor; they just know that they’re “broke.”) One more crummy trip to go – or you can forget about your wife’s anniversary present. Or those swell Christmas gifts you dreamed of giving your kids. But you can hardly keep your eyes open – even with all those toothpicks. (You’ve long ago learned to snap off the points at each end: With those points, they could usually keep your eyelids from closing. But the tiny holes and spots of blood became a nuisance, and a literal pain.) So again, what do you do? Here is what you do: You turn up the volume on your “platform” radio, cruise around as fast as you can (covering as much territory as possible), and hope for that one, final, poor-house-breaking customer. Instead, at 3 AM, after driving for 17 hours, you mow down a 21-year-old in a crosswalk while cruising through a red light – a detail that would not likely matter even if your drooping eyes saw it.
That doesn’t mean Lyft fires you, of course. Because you were just doing what Lyft wanted you to do. What it set up this Satanic arrangement with a car rental company for. And what little its team of crackerjack defense attorneys can get away with spending. And what modern American culture encourages all companies to do. The difference is that, from now on, you’ll have to be a Lyft driver using your own personal car – that not-so-new one whose maintenance costs are spiking every day now (especially in the modern Trump Era, Part 2).
As for the 21-year-old, well, if it’s true, she’s spending a delightful time in Heaven, or on fire from here to eternity in “the Other Place.” Depends on a lot of things that happened during her first 21 years. Or not. Her parents, brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, and a boatload of friends, will just have to do without her. But there are plenty of other friends and family members, right? So, no pain, no gain. Right? Or some other cliché that one hopes will take a tiny bit of the pain away.
The beauty of it all is that you don’t even have to be a Lyft passenger to pay a dreadful price for that wonderful ride in that swell car (usually a two-year-old black, small SUV) with that “new car smell.”
Of course, some of these unlucky victims are passengers – not just pedestrians, or fellow motorists. And you could be a passenger riding on a beautiful day, with the sun just coming up, trying to arrive first at work to impress your boss. What you may not know, of course, is that your driver began his shift at 3 PM the day before, to catch the front edge of PM rush hour traffic. Just your luck.
As I said, this is just one of a million stories. Or maybe not that many. Two years ago, in California alone, a class action lawsuit was filed against Uber. It had more than 100,000 plaintiffs. But hey? Lyft is much smaller. Maybe it’s safer. Maybe not. And maybe Lyft has run out of rental cars to participate in its trips-of-the-week endurathon – where all the winners provided 150 trips. Strangely, none of them provided 151. Or maybe not so strangely.
#lyftaccidents #uberaccidents #transportationnetworkcompanies #transalt #taxiaccidents