Is there discrimination targeted against Lyft drivers? Well, according to studies after studies, there is, and the victims are Black drivers and those who are members of minority groups. The Ridesharing Forum team has more.
If you get tickets and pay driving fines more frequently, it’s that you might be Black. Research shows that these people are ticketed at a much higher rate, and it’s quite unfair because they are not ticketed before they violate driving rules but simply because they are Black.
“… This leaves open the question of why,” the media who reported the study’s findings pointed out. “Bias is an obvious answer, but it’s hard to eliminate an alternative explanation: Minority groups may engage in more unsafe driving, and the police are trying to deter that.”
A 2022 article in The Washington Post has also delved deep into this, and interestingly, it’s simply a matter of prejudice.
The study on the table is what Lyft has given access to, featuring data from their drivers. The findings confirm that drivers who are members of minority groups tend to get more tickets and pay higher fees.
For context on how the study came into fruition, Lyft once provided data on its drivers in Florida, hundreds of thousands of them, along with a record of their entire GPS pings that their tracking systems forward to Lyft’s company servers.
These, alongside detailed maps of Florida’s roads and their speed limits, whether a driver has sped up or not could be determined. The researchers also combined these with police records of accidents while cross-referencing their locations to any car that experienced a sudden stop in a particular spot simultaneously.
In addition, to further supplement those facts, voting registration records of the drivers were also collected, which are the sources of the ethnicity of the driver. If those information are not enough, images from those IDs are also recorded to further confirm their ethnicity.
Finally, to piece all those information together, the speeding tickets issued in Florida were collected and seen, then matched with those belonging to the Lyft drivers previously profiled.
Is there an issue? Yes, there is, but Lyft is taking action to prevent them from escalating.
For instance, the app has incentives so drivers can avoid traffic violations. Do they work? Yes, they do
“Compared with the general population of motorists, our sample is less prone to speed, especially more than 10 mph over the limit,” the researchers found out. “As a result, our analysis examines only 1,423 citations for speeding.” While lower than you’d expect, that’s more than enough to do some statistics on the frequency of these citations.”
However, it is not only because of the driver’s skin color that they get reprimanded. Their gender, the design of their car, and several other factors also come into play.
In a comedic take, driving while Black was something that history has negatively highlighted. There were instances several decades ago, such as in the 1990s, when a Black man named Rodney King was stopped after a high-speed chase and beaten by police in Los Angeles. This incident did not only become nationwide news but also led to riots in LA in 1992, which sparked unrest and the killing of over 50 people, not to mention thousands of injuries and a billion in damages to properties.
Lyft is one of the world’s leading ride-hailing platforms, offering a more convenient way to book rides, such as while traveling or going to work.