WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 7 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A
said Alexandra Zeitz-Moskin, a
spokeswoman for the New York
City Alliance Against Sexual As-
sault.
“I think those words are really
meaningful and powerful,” Zeitz-
Moskin said. “One acknowledges
that the experience was real for
the survivor, and the other avoids
the conversation, which can
make someone question the va-
lidity of their truth and feel
potentially re-traumatized.”
Kiani Whitehorn says she
opened the door and jumped
from her Lyft after a driver, who
was complimenting her looks,
veered off course and wouldn’t
stop. She suffered bruises and
cuts. She reported the incident to
Lyft and to police, she said. A Lyft
representative told her the com-
pany would open an investiga-
tion and ban the driver, and Lyft
confirmed to The Washington
Post that it had banned the driv-
er.
Whitehorn said she was still
charged for the ride, however.
“That’s super annoying that I
had to pay 10 dollars to jump out
of a car,” she said. “It’s kind of
funny, because I deliberately
chose Lyft because I thought it
was a safer app.”
Liz Soehngen, 32, said a driver
last year offered her and another
passenger a free ride. He told
them that it was in honor of a
holiday, a nd asked them to cancel
their trips on their phones so they
wouldn’t be charged. But she
became alarmed once the driver
draped a towel over his phone
covering the navigation map.
She and the other passenger
exchanged messages on their
phone screens and asked to get
out. They stopped at a house
where strangers were gathered
on a porch and arranged new
rides home.
Lyft has said little to her about
what action it took, other than to
specify she wouldn’t be paired
with the same driver again.
“I just freaked out, and I was
crying,” said the former sexual
assault crisis counselor with the
YWCA Silicon Valley. “This was a
guy who was planning to do
something; all he needed was
opportunity.... The idea that he
was out there and could have just
picked up somebody else was
intolerable.”
[email protected]Tielking started a social media
campaign known as “Take Back
the Ride,” collecting stories from
more than 40 women who said
they faced harassment in Ubers
and Lyfts. She has also cam-
paigned directly with Lyft execu-
tives to ask them to make chang-
es, both during a tour she took of
the company’s headquarters and
then after, when they agreed to
meet with her in October.
In a 60-slide presentation to
the team in charge of safety,
Tielking recommended a clearer
navigation system to report ha-
rassment within the app, as well
as improved driver training and
better transparency on how the
company addresses harassment.
During the presentation, Tielk-
ing showed Lyft executives how
much easier it was to report
harassment in Uber’s app, which
included multiple, visible help
icons and a dedicated safety
“toolkit.”
“Lyft constantly says that safe-
ty is its number one priority, but I
think in reality image is its top
priority,” Tielking said. “I think
all these reports are treated more
as inconveniences where the
news needs to get brushed under
the rug.”
Mary Kobayashi, 35, of Seattle
complained in March to Lyft that
a driver proposed to her twice
and offered to fly her to Las
Vegas.
After Kobayashi, a Web show
co-host, said no to being his
girlfriend, he asked to be her
godfather. She says he also reject-
ed another rider planning to join
the trip and insinuated he knew
when Kobayashi got off work, all
during a 10-minute trip to meet a
friend at a bar.
“It sent a chill up my spine,”
she said. The company told her
she wouldn’t be paired with the
driver again.
That’s the same response Tiel-
king received each time she re-
ported harassment. It’s part of a
standard response the women
say is inadequate — though Lyft
said recently it has stopped using
that language in its automated
and email communication with
riders.
In the case of sexual harass-
ment, it is better for victims to
receive a more personal response
that conveys that the company
hears them and believes them,says there are multiple avenues
inside and outside the app for
riders to report a bad experience.
After a ride, passengers are
asked to rate their drivers with a
star system. Lyft says it uses this
system to help determine wheth-
er rides have gone awry. If a ride
gets fewer than four stars, the
app asks passengers what went
wrong, and Lyft monitors re-
sponses for allegations of harass-
ment or assault. Those are routed
to teams inside Lyft for a follow-
up. After a ride, passengers get
receipts emailed to them with
links to find help, and Lyft’s
online support page includes an
option to be contacted by its
safety h otline. The “Ride History”
category in the Lyft app also
includes the option to “get help.”
“Change isn’t happening fast
enough,” said Allison Tielking, a
student entering her senior year
at Stanford.
She chose Lyft for rides last
summer during an internship in
Boston, thinking it aligned better
with her social values. But, she
says, three drivers made sexually
explicit comments and inappro-
priate advances.in more than 20,000 drivers get-
ting kicked off its app. Lyft has
not provided data on the results
of its ongoing checks.
Both Lyft a nd Uber have prom-
ised transparency reports outlin-
ing behavior by drivers in multi-
ple categories of sexual assault,
misconduct and harassment, but
neither has scheduled those re-
ports’ releases. Now, members of
Congress are taking steps to ob-
tain the data on incidences of
assault and abuse reported on the
companies’ platforms.
Women who say they experi-
enced sexual harassment in a Lyft
describe an interaction that left
them feeling unheard by a face-
less entity when they complained
to the company about situations
that made them feel uncomfort-
able or even in danger.
The women said their com-
plaints were initially routed to a
chat app — powered by artificial
intelligence and not a real hu-
man. To find the safety hotline
number, customers had to exit
the app and manually search for
the hotline number.
Lyft said this spring it would
eliminate its chat bot. Lyft alsothat Uber and Lyft will respond.
Lyft spokeswoman Lauren Al-
exander said the company’s re-
sponse had fallen short in some
instances, and she acknowledged
it could do more in some cases of
alleged sexual harassment. “We
are always exploring ways to
improve the experience for all
users, and this includes how we
monitor and respond to allega-
tions of misconduct to ensure
that our users are supported.”
Lyft declined to address the
individual incidents in detail, cit-
ing privacy concerns.
Lyft nearly doubled its U.S.
market share to about 40 percent
over two years by carefully craft-
ing an image as the friendlier
ride, compared with Uber.
As Lyft prepared in March to
go p ublic, it said in a filing that its
reputation is key to differentiat-
ing itself from Uber. “We have
built a brand that balances our
mission-driven ethos with a
friendly, hospitality-oriented per-
sonality,” the company said.
According to its critics, Lyft
has failed in numerous ways in
addressing sexual harassment
concerns.
Those critics say the design of
Lyft’s app makes it too hard to
report harassment. They want a
“panic button” like the one in
place on Uber for more than a
year now. A small, shield-shaped
symbol stays on the home screen
during the ride, allowing passen-
gers to swipe up and click on “
assistance” to automatically dial
for help. In some cities, that
option also provides trip infor-
mation to local law enforcement
via the GPS built into the app.
In May, a year after Uber made
the change, Lyft announced that
it, too, would add a panic button.
The company said it would be
added later this year.
The women also complained
that it took at least three steps to
report a driver’s bad behavior on
a past Lyft trip. Uber, in compari-
son, offers a help option labeled
“My driver was unprofessional”
on the first screen, plus a “Critical
Sa fety Response Line” option
that directs passengers to call 911
or Uber’s s afety t eam once they’re
out of harm’s way.
Lyft added recurring driver
background checks in April,
nearly a year after Uber did so —
something Uber has said resulteddia.
Activists also say key aspects of
Lyft’s service, including the de-
sign of its app, offer fewer safety
features than Uber’s, including a
labyrinthine series of clicks to file
a complaint, compared with
Uber’s single click.
“I just kind of roll my eyes,
because they do have these bill-
boards promoting themselves as
this socially conscious app,” said
Emily Ebel, part of a Stanford
University group of students who
said they were harassed in ride-
hailing trips and have advocated
for both Lyft a nd Uber to improve
their policies.
She says a Lyft driver once
suggested she have his children
after a series of inappropriate
questions and urging her to con-
vert to his religion. Lyft pledged
never to pair her with the driver
again. She said this response was
inadequate, because it treated
her case as a sour personal inter-
action, instead of saying the com-
pany would discipline or better
train the driver.
“They’re just another tech
company out to get money,” said
Ebel, a 29-year-old PhD student
in evolutionary genetics, who
ended up deleting her account.
The rider complaints about
Lyft reflect a new dynamic intro-
duced into American cities by the
arrival of thousands of ride-hail-
ing vehicles, as well as new expec-
tations among consumers about
how companies in the #MeToo era
should respond to allegations of
misconduct.
While passengers have been
riding in taxis for decades — also
sometimes encountering unpro-
fessional behavior — the problem
of sexual harassment by drivers
in app-based rides is becoming
more visible in part because the
sheer volume of trips is growing.
In t he past, a taxi company had
a trained workforce of profes-
sional drivers who also could be
relatively anonymous, with their
taxi licenses generally within eye-
sight. The driver was often physi-
cally separated by a barrier. To -
day, with apps, passengers typi-
cally ride in the personal cars of
drivers, whose profiles are visible
on customer’s phones. When
drivers behave inappropriately,
riders have strong expectations
LYFT FROM A
Some who claim harassment say Lyft hasn’t done enough
“Lyft constantly says that safety is its
number one priority, but I think in reality
image is its top priority.”
Allison Tielking, a Stanford University student who started
a social media campaign to gather stories from women
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