Uber Safety - TfL Needs To Act

After it was granted a licence to continue operating in London, driver and rider matching service Uber might have felt reinvigorated, emboldened even. Some of its drivers have certainly felt emboldened, but perhaps not in the way the company would like. That is because the litany of Uber vehicles being bent in road traffic accidents is becoming such that it can no longer be hidden from view - or contested.

For this, we have that small army of black cab drivers ready and willing to record not just the appalling road craft displayed by Private Hire Vehicles in the capital - the overwhelming majority of which are Uber ones - but also the aftermath of crashes. Sometimes these involve other road users. More often, they are solo efforts and totally self-inflicted.

And just remember folks, while laughing along with the sheer idiocy of many of the drivers who bent their vehicles while pretending to be up to the job, many of these crashes involved paying customers. Don’t forget that, as we start with one mildly impaled Prius captioned “Too busy sat naving again”, and see one prize specimen having a coming together with a cyclist that leaves the rear nearside door bent out of shape.

One cabbie came across another shunt: “Uber Knock Over Motorcyclist ... again! Hey @dkhos one of your ‘partners’ has had another accident in London ... looking at his satnav instead of the road as usual!” Or perhaps the driver was distracted by using that Uber app on his phone. And then there was another, described simply “Chelsea bridge north side”.

When the Metropolitan Police over in Tower Hamlets told “#ResponseTeamC dealt with an RTC on Commercial Road involving two parties that are walking wounded. Great teamwork with our colleagues from @Ldn_Ambulance and @LFBTowerHamlets”, that was another bent Prius. And what about this? “Please Observe Caution In Aldwych. A @TfLTPH Licensed #SatNavReliant Minicab Is On It’s Roof And In Several Pieces”.

Aldwych? ALDWYCH? How the merry f*** did that car get to be doing the kind of speed needed to produce a shunt like that on sodding Aldwych? Whatever. Pedestrians are not exempt from this reign of terror. “#Uber just run over someone in Brownswood Rd, Another case of looking at a sat nav & not the road”. Then we see the aftermath of another Prius bending masterclass: “Nothing a bit of gaffer tape won't fix”.

You want a reprise of the Bent White Prius? Here it comes: “another horror story #Halloween2018”. Three in a row? Matt Black Taxi is your man on the spot: “There is one common denominator here ALL are licensed by @TfL as PHV drivers. But no one in the MSM is interested in this daily carnage of #ubercrash the money keeps rolling in to the TfL coffers and they keep rolling the cars over!” Too true.

Those crashes happened in the space of a few days. One shudders to think how many went unrecorded, or how this pans out over the months and years. Seriously, if the cab trade was generating this sort of carnage, something would be done about it.

So why isn’t something being done about Uber’s lousy accident record? TfL? Mr Mayor? City Hall AMs? DfT? Don’t all shout at once.

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