A new exposé into the sexual assault problem on Uber shows that an assault is reported by an Uber driver or passenger every eight minutes, and that the company has intentionally been dragging its feet on letting women request women drivers.

A couple weeks back, when the rideshare giant Uber announced it would allow women riders to request women drivers, I cynically assumed that this was just a new way to charge riders more money without getting them to notice it. The truth may be even darker. It turns out they’ve had this technology in use in other nations for more than five years, and just didn’t roll it out in the US for business reasons.

That’s one finding in a New York Times exposé of the sexual assault problem on Uber just published Wednesday morning. That report contains the shocking statistic that “Uber received a report of sexual assault or sexual misconduct in the United States almost every eight minutes on average between 2017 and 2022.”

The Times gets this information from court documents in the oodles of sexual assault lawsuits that have been filed against Uber in recent years. And we can’t help but be reminded of a 2015 incident when then-SFist editor Eve Batey had her Uber driver tell her, "You fucking bitch, I'm going to find you, rape you, and kill you."    

But those court documents also include internal Uber communications that showed the company had identified technologies that would help prevent assaults, but did not roll them out. One of these technologies involved putting cameras in drivers' cars. But Uber concluded they couldn’t do that, because they are determined to classify their employees as independent contractors who do not get minimum wage guarantees or benefits.

And putting cameras in the cars would legally require that the drivers be proper company employees, so Uber passed on that for financial reasons.

Uber insists to the Times that 99.9% of their US rides happen completely without incident, and that may be true. But the sheer volume of those rides still means that the 0.1% that do have incidents total up to quite a large number of alleged assaults. Per the Times, "From 2017 to 2022, a total of 400,181 Uber trips resulted in reports of sexual assault and sexual misconduct in the United States."

And Uber has been aware of this for years. The Times obtained a 2021 Uber global safety standards that said “Our purpose/goal is not to be the police,” and that. “Our bar is much lower and our goal is to protect the company and set the tolerable risk level for our operations.”

Still, as the high-profile assault incidents piled up, the company was able to use some big data sets to detect patterns that correlated with sexual assaults. They found that the victims were almost always women riders or drivers (and yes, sometimes it's the drivers being assaulted too), the offenders tended to be men, and these assaults disproportionately happened on rides home from bars. The Times reports that Uber’s exhaustive forecasts “used 43 predictors, such as feedback reporting a ‘creepy driver,’ safety incident history and geographic information, including the number of bars near a pickup.”

There are understandable reasons that Uber did not ban all rides that line up with these predictors. “Unilaterally blocking certain types of trips, like all requests from bars late at night, would leave many people stranded on the street, encouraging them to drive drunk or walk home unsafely,” Uber’s head of safety for the Americas Hannah Nilles told the Times.

Though there were tools at the company’s disposal that they did not use. The Times informs us that the now-ballyhooed “women riders request women drivers” feature was introduced in Saudi Arabia in 2019, a full six years ago. But Uber held off on introducing it in the US, fearing the blowback from culture warriors and men's rights activist lawsuits. The Times even obtained an internal Uber memo from right after Trump was inaugurated this year, saying “This is not the right environment to launch, and we want to take a beat to assess our timing.”

Yet Uber knew assaults were a major problem. The Times report recounts many horror stories, including that of a woman in Houston in December 2023 who hailed a ride while intoxicated, and woke up in a hotel at 5:50 am, having been raped. It turned out that driver had multiple previous assault complaints, including one on a ride that should have lasted 22 minutes, but somehow lasted five hours.

“Are our actions (or lack of actions) defensible?” an internal Uber investigation of those incidents concluded.

Uber has been aggressively trying to button things up after the out of control “asshole culture” that defined the company's Travis Kalanick era of 2010 to 2017. Their hiring of Dara Khosrowshahi as CEO in 2017 was seen as an attempt to clean up that image.

But it may just all have been image management. Uber did release a report on sexual assault on its platform in 2019, but waited until after their IPO to do it. And even in doing so, they limited what they counted as a “sexual assault."

“The company did not disclose reports of other misconduct, including masturbation or threatening sexual violence,” the Times points out. They also decided to leave dates and times out of the reports, because they felt doing so would have “serious business implications,” like “less users in high peak times.”

We should point out that Uber’s competitor Lyft has also had significant sexual assault issues over the years. And like Lyft, Uber is now profitable after years of losing money.

But their road to profitability has been paved with some ethically questionable moves in terms of rider safety, and those moves may still cost Uber as lawsuits make their way through the courts.

Related: Last Night, My Uber Driver Said He Was Going To Rape And Kill Me [SFist]

Image: Muncie - July 10, 2023: Uber Car for hire sticker. Lyft and Uber have replaced many Taxi cabs for transportation with a smart phone app. (Getty Images)