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Loukaitou-Sideris on Abuse Complaints Against Ridehail Companies

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A CNN report about incidents of sexual assault and abuse committed by ridehail drivers from Uber and Lyft quoted Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, distinguished professor of urban planning. Lyft has failed to publicly release reports disclosing complaints of sexual violence and now faces several potential lawsuits. Ridehail companies “should be very concerned if people start saying that there’s an increasing number of people that complain about harassment because this whole idea of safe travel through Lyft or Uber falls apart,” said Loukaitou-Sideris, who has conducted extensive research on sexual harassment on public transit. Information around safety incidents can help people make informed decisions about how and when to travel, but transparency also runs the risk of damaging a company’s reputation, she said. Loukaitou-Sideris added that one reason people do not report alleged incidents of sexual violence is that they believe that nothing much will happen as a result.

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Matute on Debut of Metro’s On-Demand Rideshare Service

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Juan Matute, deputy director of the Institute of Transportation Studies, spoke to Spectrum News about L.A. Metro’s new on-demand rideshare service. Metro Micro allows passengers to summon a ride within a designated service area for $1 per trip. The program will launch in the Watts/Willowbrook and LAX/Inglewood areas. If successful, it will expand into four additional neighborhoods next summer. “Metro will learn much more about where people actually want to go from and to, and when they want to do it,” Matute said. “With a fixed-route bus, you know where you pick them up and go, but you don’t know how far they walked or if they used some other device.” While other transit agencies have tried similar on-demand services and failed, Matute explained that Metro has enough money to experiment without putting the agency itself at risk.

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Matute on Expansion of Mobility Options

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Juan Matute, deputy director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UCLA Luskin, spoke with Spectrum News 1 about a new electric-bike-sharing program in Santa Monica. Lyft will provide the e-bikes, replacing the human-powered bikes previously offered by the city. The new program is part of an expansion of services provided by app-based mobility companies. “Lyft and Uber see themselves as competing with people buying cars or people buying more cars per household, so they want to meet everybody’s full mobility needs,” Matute said. He also commented in a separate story on electric scooters offered for sale rather than short-term rental. As travel of all kinds has decreased during the COVID-19 lockdown, offering scooters for sale shows investors that these companies “can be nimble, that they have an opportunity to bring in revenue, to ride out this pandemic,” Matute said.

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Yaroslavsky on Labor-Tech Faceoff as a Campaign Barometer

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Zev Yaroslavsky, director of the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA Luskin, spoke to the Associated Press about a faceoff between Big Labor and Big Tech that has become an issue in the Democratic presidential primary. Several major Democratic White House hopefuls have expressed support for a California bill backed by labor and opposed by tech giants such as Uber and Lyft, the article said. The bill would make it harder for tech companies to classify workers as independent contractors, who are not entitled to minimum wage or workers’ compensation. “It says something about where the candidates think the primary voters are on this issue,” Yaroslavsky said. They “may believe that labor can be more helpful to them than the high-tech companies can be to them in a caucus state or a primary.”

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The Traffic Bogeyman Is Us, Manville Says

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Michael Manville, associate professor of urban planning, spoke to LAist about a study examining the impact that Uber and Lyft have on road congestion. The study, which was commissioned by the rideshare services, found that they accounted for 2 to 3 percent of all vehicle miles traveled in Los Angeles County in September 2018. “If [Lyft and Uber] have confessed to slowing you down while you are in traffic, then they have confessed to sharing in the crime that you are also committing,” said Manville, a faculty fellow with UCLA Luskin’s Institute of Transportation Studies. Manville said his colleagues like to joke that a more interesting study would be to look at how much Ford and Toyota contribute to traffic congestion. “It’s fun to blame tech companies for things — they’re really easy to dislike — but congestion is something that we all cause,” he said.

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Loukaitou-Sideris Provides Insight on Rideshare Safety for Women

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Urban Planning Professor Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris shed light on women’s interactions with transportation systems in a Rewire article explaining female riders’ frustrations with rideshare services. Loukaitou-Sideris said sexual harassment is incredibly common in transportation settings around the world. Incidents of sexual harassment and uncomfortable behavior with rideshare drivers have prompted requests for increased safety measures, especially for women. While nearly 45% of female rideshare users have expressed their preference for a female driver, only 20-30% of Lyft and Uber drivers are female, and neither rideshare service allows female riders to request a female driver. Loukaitou-Sideris’ research on women-only public transportation in other countries, such as women-only train cars, found that women worried such an arrangement would “perpetuate discrimination” by taking away the option to sit in other cars of the train. Many women express their desire to be able to safely use the same service as men, instead of needing a women-only solution.

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