Picture this: you’re competing in a time-trial cycling race along a route that’s not known in advance. Instead of following a marked course, you receive instructions via notifications on your mobile phone.

Looking at your phone while cycling is extremely dangerous. But to stay on track, you must consult it nearly continuously.

If such a race took place on the streets of a busy, car-oriented city like Sydney, you would likely opt out. Yet food-delivery riders face precisely this situation every day: they receive order notifications while riding, and if they don’t check them, they lose the order and their hourly earnings suffer.

This is just one example of the dangerous incentive structure under which riders operate. These incentives are a central focus of our study just published in Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives, based on in-depth interviews with ten food-delivery riders in Sydney.

Dying while delivering

Delivery rider safety is an urgent concern. In New South Wales, serious injuries involving food-delivery riders increased from just 2 in 2017 to 75 in 2020. In Victoria, data from the past five years has shown that one in 20 people who went to hospital with e-bike accident injuries said they were working at the time.

According to the Transport Workers Union, by 2024 at least 18 riders had tragically lost their lives while working in Australia.

Previous studies have mostly addressed individual factors that make some riders more prone to risky behaviour. In contrast, our study examines platform decisions and operations. This includes how orders are assigned, what information is transmitted and when, and how payment is structured.

What did our........

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