Say you are a car rental company. Say you are even Lyft. Say you even claim to have nothing to do with transportation: You are really only a matchmaker. For the privilege of using your “app,” you can not only find your driver’s next customer, but with your app, he or she can usually find him or her close by.
But there is one thing, as a matchmaker, a Troglodyte or a fairy godmother that Lyft can never get away from – and which its victims hope their lawyers are not too stupid to not grasp: Whatever you say you are, and whoever drives the vehicles that transport those customers he or she got using your app, you make money from this. Or at least your official or formal goal is to do so.
Now say you’re Uber or Lyft. While the drivers usually operate their own personal cars, you only insure them when they are providing trips for your company, yet you provide no training, no vehicle storage, no monitoring, no maintenance, no management of any sort. So as long as its costing your company almost no money for them to work for your company, and the profits exceed the risks, you get to keep 20 percent of every passenger’s trip costs. So one would think that you would want your drivers to at least provide a reasonable number of trips – or as many trips per week as possible, would you not? You would seem, superficially, to be right. Lyft, for example, has arrangements with car rental companies whereby it’s drivers can use rental cars. And if a driver provides a certain number of trips per week – at the time of my last lawsuit against Lyft as an expert witness, it was 150 trips – you will pay the driver’s $200/week rental fee. So you can’t expect to argue in court that Lyft doesn’t care how many trips its drivers provide – with their own vehicles or any other vehicles? Or can you? At least you don’t argue this in court if you don’t want the judge to treat your company’s lawyers with hostility for insulting their intelligence.
So, with all this, one would think that Lyft, for example (Uber might care about trip volumes as well) cares how many trips its drivers provide each week (factoring in a rare vacation or a few really, really sick days) – would one not?
Well, in theory – or at the macro level, as economists like to put it – it does care. But in modern America, in a company born in Silicon Valley (almost certainly one of the few successful spin-offs of Uber started by an ex-Uber employee who “broke away” from Uber and thought he or she could create his or own company, and make the “big bucks”), you would care about trip volumes to a great extent. Of course, you’re also a company in a country that began efforts to eliminate labor nearly half a century ago – launching what I coined as the U.S. Jobs Elimination Program (or “the JEP”) a decade ago, for an unwritten and unofficial program that I suspect began in the late 1970s, when our first major energy crisis began – when most of the nation’s unlucky motorists waited in long lines, often for hours, every other day, for the privilege of purchasing a limited volume of gasoline at an inflated price.
In America, we learn certain types of things fast (others slowly – often depending on who you are). What this experience taught the state legislatures in 48 states was that there was no reason that gas stations should be saddled with employees referred to as “pump jockeys.” So pretty soon, every state but New Jersey and Oregon got rid of them. (Both these states still require pump jockeys – proving that, at least once in a blue moon, safety matters, and that no matter how hard corporate America tries, there are occasional state legislators that it cannot bribe.)
Now, back to Lyft. Forgetting about the changes in America – or perhaps because of them – if you’re Lyft, you still want your drivers to put on mileage. Because your customers pay for every mile. And your company gets to keep 20 percent of every nickel they pay for those miles. But – here we go again: You’re in the country with “the JEP.” So you are not going to spend your effortlessly-earned money on a small army (or a handful) of minimum-wage high school drop-outs to keep track of this mileage – even if you can do it automatically. You might have robots do this. And we know that robots can count: We’ve had cash registers and coin sorters for nearly 100 years now. And, my goodness, in 1997, a computer nicknamed “Deep Blue” beat Russian chess champion Boris Karparov in a six-game series of chess. So robots can count. For sure. But what they cannot do is care about what they find. And they can surely report it. Or one of those high-school dropouts can look to see what they found. But this is America, and the JEP began nearly 50 years ago. So why should this matter now:
So here I am. An expert witness with (then) at least 45 years of experience in the transportation field, and 700 or so lawsuits under my belt. And I now have yet another one of those cases where a driver was killed. But this time, his car was not moving. I learned shortly that he had only been driving for about five months. And during the first three months, he drove for 45 days in a row. And he earned peanuts: He lived in the distant suburbs of San Francisco, and every Thursday afternoon, he drove the 90-minute trip “to town,” and during those few hours a night when he slept until the following Monday, he parked for free in a supermarket parking lot. (He likely bought a pack of cigarettes or something there every day; so if the lot was not full, what was the harm, right?) And during those mostly-waking hours he spent in the Bay Area’s hot spot, he was earning about $60 to $70/day – for driving about 14 to 15 hours a day.
Anyway, combing through dreadfully boring data, I discover that during his fourth month, our driver began taking an occasional day off. Then he began taking vacations. Then he began taking longer, more expensive vacations. Pairing these changes with his earnings, I found that during his fifth month, he only put about six to eight miles a shift on his car. Since Lyft took 20 percent of it automatically, that left him with perhaps $10 to $15 per shift. (I forget the rates at this point.) So what was going on?
He had to be doing something else with his car – and whatever it was, he squeezed something out of it – which, as it turned out, was liability insurance (too bad it wasn’t life insurance), since he was “on the platform,” for Lyft, the entire time. So I realized that he was either selling drugs or doing something equally nefarious. But I also noticed that his hours changed. Instead of driving from 5AM to midnight – capturing both rush hours’ worth of traffic and all the return trips from bars that begin to flow when the restaurant traffic begins to slow – he began driving from about 9 PM to 3 AM.
These hours didn’t line up with my understanding of any pattern of drug buys. But it lined up perfectly with something else: Prostitution! Our savvy driver was serving hookers – occasionally picking up a John a mile or so apart from the last one, but usually just parking in some dark alley where the John knew where to find his vehicle and his trustworthy hooker (or possibly, a small group of them). Likely earning $1000 a shift for her (presumably) or their work, his new employer(a) gave him a hefty share of the “take.” For these fees, the customer not only got to spend a few minutes in the back seat of a fairly swanky vehicle with that “new car smell,” which otherwise-curious police officers failed to care about if a well-marked Uber or Lyft was parked for hours after the PM rush hour shift was over – time when a more traditional Uber or Lyft driver might catch a few hours of shut-eye between the PM rush hour and the wave of return trips from San Francisco’s countless bars, whose often drunk non-car-owning patrons either cared about not driving drunk and/or were decent tippers. A safer environment for a “John” couldn’t be found. After all, hookers often had to pay off bellhops a bigger cut to continuously rent them multiple rooms a night in the hotels in which they worked. After all, maids who constantly had to change the sheets didn’t work for free. Or even for tips. Plus, the hotel managers knew that their jobs lay at risk doing this since most hotel patrons (often with their families) did not wish to stay in a hotel (usually a low-priced hotel) full of hookers where every 20 minutes, a new male stranger (often well-armed, which is legal in California) waltzed down the hallways – often angry because he felt he didn’t get his money’s worth.
Anyway, snoozing away in his SUV while one John after another climbed in and out of the back seat, one who didn’t feel like he got his money’s worth apparently complained to the driver about it, and apparently did not like the reply (which etiquette suggests need not have been the most courteous at the time, and under the circumstances). So our unidentified John (paying with cash, obviously, which is the preferred payment mechanism for both hookers and, especially, their Johns, and especially, their married Johns) simply slit our Lyft driver’s throat – leading, of course, to the lawsuit for the driver whose attorneys whose client, Lyft, I helped skin alive. But apparently not badly enough for its upper (or mid-level, or even lower-level) management to care what their drivers were doing with their mostly personal vehicles.
The main part of the story is, of course, that despite its main business goal, Lyft didn’t lift the finger (or lever) of its cheapest robot to determine whether or not its heavily insured drivers were earning any money for the company. If they cared not a dollop for making money, how stupid could one be to think that this company, lawyered-up to the gills, would care about passenger safety? Evidently plenty stupid. Because with its plethora of lawsuits, and possibly a California-style class action lawsuit in that state or another, this company does not care about passenger or driver safety – or anyone’s safety. (In most of my lawsuits against Lyft, a passenger was not even the victim.) If it did, it stands to reason that since it likely spent some small slab of money on the administrative chore of signing up every new driver, not to mention the two- or three-hour pep talk provided by a live Earthling that passed for the company’s driver training, that it would care that its drivers were undercutting the company’s “bottom line” because it did not spend a few pennies watching for clear indicators that suggested that certain drivers were not earning the company a substantial amount of revenue – or barely any revenue.
An expert witness must have some knowledge to provide meaningful assistance in any public transportation case. But he or she must also have an open mind, a dash of creativity, and a vivid set of experiences to mount a case against a company like Lyft, a major task of which is to help it fend off a significant wave of meaty lawsuits.
#lyftsafety #lyftaccidents #ubersafety #uberaccidents #transalt