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Car-service apps promise safety, but that turns out to be one big lie

Car-service apps didn’t just sell convenience. They sold safety.

That was the quiet bargain at the heart of ride-sharing’s rise: Ubers were supposed to be safer than taxis; you wouldn’t have to text your mom or a friend a photo of the taxi driver’s name and hack license plate as you step in. 

Rather, you’d see a name, a photo, a plate number right on your phone.

Your ride would be tracked. Someone would know where you were.

If something happened, there’d be accountability.

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That promise is now unraveling — and Uber’s response has been to turn on the very women who believed it.

The company is facing a wave of lawsuits over sexual assaults involving drivers, including cases in which women allege they were raped while using the service.

In one recent trial, Uber was ordered to pay a woman $8.5 million, the first verdict of its kind.

Rather than prompt a reckoning, the case exposed something dark: internal communications showed Uber executives dismissing rape victims as liars and opportunists while strategizing how to blunt the company’s legal exposure.

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This wasn’t a rogue employee speaking out of turn: It was executives, responding to investigations, privately trashing women who said they were assaulted.

That tells you everything you need to know about how Uber sees this problem — not as a safety failure, but as a public-relations inconvenience.

This matters, because Uber fundamentally changed the rules for vulnerable customers, namely, women and parents.

For all their flaws, taxis operated under a system of local oversight. Drivers were licensed, vetted and accountable to regulators who could pull permits and impose real consequences.

Uber blew that model up in the name of “innovation,” replacing it with a massive, loosely regulated workforce that the company insists it doesn’t actually employ.

And women are the ones absorbing the risk.

Between work, school, practices and the relentless logistics of modern family life, ride-sharing had become a pressure valve for our family.

We’ve sent our 12-year-old in Ubers to save ourselves hours of shuttling, because we were told — and wanted to believe — it was safe.

Now I’m not sure I believe that.

The most unsettling part is how unnecessary this all feels. Uber could have leaned into real safety: stricter background checks, tighter monitoring, swift removal of drivers accused of misconduct and transparency when incidents occur.

Instead, it prioritized scale and growth, trusting that legal defenses and arbitration clauses would mop up the mess.

Paying lip service to the idea of safety, Uber made headlines over the summer with the announcement that women could select female-drivers.

Uber received sexual misconduct reports every eight minutes during six-year period: unsealed court docs

One problem: The definition of a female these days seems to be in the eye of the beholder, not up to basic biology. 

Consumers’ Research sounded the alarm on that policy then, and is leading the charge now.

About these policies, its executive director, Will Hild, told The Post in no uncertain terms: “This is scumbag behavior.”

When women started saying the system wasn’t working, Uber didn’t slow down to listen. It lawyered up.

There’s a deep irony here. Uber built its brand on the idea that technology could make everyday life safer and more accountable.

Instead, it created a system in which accountability is fragmented and safety is treated as a marketing claim rather than a responsibility.

And when that system fails — as it clearly has — the burden falls on the people least able to carry it.

Passengers didn’t ask for perfection. They asked for honesty and good faith.

What they got was a promise of peace of mind, then mockery when that promise turned out to be false.

If Uber wants to earn back trust, it can start by doing something radical: stop blaming the women who were hurt, stop trying to rig the legal system, admit the post-Uber world has made women less safe and work to make things right.

Until then, every ride will come with the same question car-service apps promised we’d never have to ask:

Is this ride really safe?

Bethany Mandel writes and podcasts at The Mom Wars.

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