Best ways to fix Uber in South Africa

Appointing drivers as full-time employees, mandating defensive driver training, and enforcing standards through random and unscheduled checks could help Uber improve its service to regain the trust of the South African public.

That is according to Driving.co.za founder and managing director Rob Handfield-Jones, a road safety and driver training expert.

The e-hailing service has come under fire in the past year due to the behaviour of some of its drivers, the state of the cars they drive, and actual trip fares being much higher than customers are quoted.

Handfield-Jones’ company has many years of experience in training drivers in business fleets to ensure they not only drive as safely as reasonably possible.

Handfield-Jones is strongly opposed to driver contracting or outsourcing for both passenger and goods transport.

He believes this approach inevitably results in a “race-to-the-bottom” scenario where companies are focused on dropping fares as low as possible with minimal safety standards for both drivers and customers.

“In a ride-hailing context where thousands of lives are at risk every day, I’ve always thought it absurd,” he said.

If someone drives other people around for a living, they should be in the top 1% of drivers, not “unemployable but for their driving licence”.

“We wouldn’t tolerate people being picked this way to fly our airliners, why do we accept it for passenger transport by road?”

“For comparison, our road death toll is the equivalent of a fully-laden domestic passenger jet crashing every three days.”

He told MyBroadband that Driving.co.za has had a couple of clients over the years who were split between full-time and outsourced drivers.

They found that the crash rate of the outsourced drivers was always higher than that of the full-time employed drivers.

“In one case it was double that of the full-time employed drivers,” he said.

Handfield-Jones said that one of the clients decided to stop using outsourced drivers altogether about five years ago.

“It was cheaper to be slightly over-staffed with full-time drivers to give them scheduling flexibility than to keep paying huge excesses on insurance claims caused by outsourced drivers of unknown pedigree.”

Handfield-Jones argues that ride-hailing drivers are de facto “professional” drivers and should be trained like many drivers permanently employed by South African companies.

“Mandatory annual defensive driver training is essential, with regular unannounced live standards enforcement by dual-camera dashcam, cross-checked with telematics data, plus incident reviews and disciplinary processes,” he said.

“None of this, to my knowledge, is happening in the ride-hailing industry, which applies in the kind of fleets we train.”

Handfield-Jones said a problem was that companies would often balk at the price of training without considering the costs down the line.

“They can continue to eat the insurance costs and, later, the potentially ruinous costs of self-insuring when underwriters start turning their noses up at their books.”

“The last few years of natural disasters in South Africa, in particular, have put pressure on the relationship between underwriters and re-insurers.”

“Underwriters are becoming more aggressive about limiting their losses. Tightening standards on cars is a low-hanging fruit for them.”

Dealing with criminal elements

There have also been allegations of Uber drivers being complicit in robbery or other crimes against passengers, which the company has denied.

Handfield-Jones does not believe there is a feasible way to screen drivers for potential criminal behaviour before an appointment.

South African social media screening company Farosian argues that pro-actively identifying online behaviour of potential drivers could improve rider safety.

It previously conducted a study in 2021 with a well-known e-hailing service, in which it assessed the online profiles of 1,003 of its drivers.

“Our findings showed a strong, direct correlation between a driver’s social media risk score and their performance data, such as complaints, star ratings, and work hours,” the company recently told MyBroadband.

“Despite this clear connection, we were dismissed and told that implementing these checks might be too complicated.”

Farosian said many companies insisted they could not afford to lose drivers flagged as high-risk — an approach which it believes clearly prioritised profits over passenger safety and brand protection.

“We are constantly seeing an alarming volume of social media posts and news articles about passengers who have been harmed,” Farosian stated.

“Nothing effective is being done to show that these companies are taking strides to make any long-lasting changes, even when there’s a proven solution sitting in front of their noses.”