The iconic pink mustaches of the Lyft brand ride-booking service are unmistakable. Whether it’s a large furry bumper-stache or a “glowstache” illuminating the night streets, the Lyft paraphernalia attracts users who have downloaded the company’s application as well as those in need of transportation who don’t have the app. The latter is what happened to Lyft driver Sierra Bufe on Thursday, July 16 around 2:30 a.m. as she was driving near the cab-station at the west end of Boulder’s Pearl Street Mall.
Bufe, a Lyft driver since September, had her glowstache on when a man hailed her down from the curb asking for a ride. The incident was recorded on a dashboard camera Bufe always has running while at work for safety reasons. Boulder Weekly examined the dashboard recording.
“This is the kind of reason that I have a dash cam so that in case anything goes wrong I have a record of what I did and what other people did,” Bufe says. The camera faces forward so after the rider waves her down in the footage, the camera only picks up audio of what happened next.
Bufe rolls down her window and the man asks about her rates, to which she replies she’s a Lyft driver and the app determines the price. He says he doesn’t have the app but does have a smartphone, and Bufe offers to help him set up the app in order to get a free ride (Lyft has a promotion that gives a free ride to any first-time downloader of their app). “That sounds great to me,” he says.
He gets into the front passenger seat and Bufe pulls into a nearby parking spot. He immediately says he doesn’t want to sign up for the app and questions why he needs to put in his credit card information if his ride will be free. Bufe tries to explain that while the ride will be free for him, she still wants to get paid, which is only possible if they are connected through the Lyft platform. He asks, “What’s the hold up here, you already offered me a ride? … I’ll do the Lyft app on the way.”
When she tries to explain again that he needs to be signed up in order for her to drive, he questions her business skills and uses some profanity at which point she asks him to get out of the car.
He keeps arguing with her, however, until she raises her voice, telling him to get out of the car or she’ll call the police. “Call the police, call them. Fucking call them,” he tells Bufe.
She responds with profanity as well, telling him to get out of her car over and over again. After that, Bufe says, “I put my hand on his shoulder muscle and pushed it like two inches and I said, ‘Get out.’ The door was not open when I did that. I did not push him out of the car.”
Soon after, the passenger gets out of the car and Bufe drives away, audibly shaken by the encounter. She proceeds to pick up one more fare before going home and calling Lyft through the critical response line to report the incident.
As a rule, ride-booking service companies, officially known as Transportation Network Companies (TNC), are considered a safer place to work than traditional taxicab businesses. This safety aspect helps to explain why 30 percent of Lyft drivers, 40 percent of Sidecar drivers and 14 percent of Uber drivers are women, compared to just 12.7 percent of the nation’s taxicab drivers according to Forbes. The reason for the increased saftey is simple; all those seeking a ride with a TNC driver are required to have the TNC’s app with a credit card on file before getting a ride. It’s less likely that a person will rob or injure a driver when a computer knows exactly who is in the car at all times. But there may be a serious hole in this safety net as pointed out by Bufe’s experience on July 16.
By allowing the man into her car before he had downloaded the app, Bufe was not protected through the Lyft platform. The company had no way of knowing who was in her car. But after reporting her fearful incident to Lyft, Bufe says, “They are treating me like I’m the potential threat to the community because I touched the passenger … They didn’t support my own judgement as a woman out there.”
Just before 5 a.m. on July 16, Bufe received an email telling her the company had deactivated her as a driver while they conducted an investigation of “a potential violation of our community guidelines and Terms of Service,” the email states.
Several hours later, Bufe received another email, this time from Adam (no last name provided), a trust and safety specialist. It said the company received feedback that Bufe “physically removed a person from your vehicle … Could you clarify what sort of physical altercation occurred?”
Bufe wasn’t allowed to pick up passengers for a total of 12 hours while she emailed back and forth with Adam regarding the incident — sending in the video and explaining what happened. Eventually, Lyft reactivated her driver status without reprimanding her for stopping for a curbside hail even though it was clear she had done so from the dashboard tape.
Critics of the TNC model claim that their drivers, despite signing terms of service contracts prohibiting it, often pick up fares who don’t have the app and transport them for cash, even though such actions are against state law. Only fully permitted taxicab companies operating under expensive licenses are allowed to pick up fares byway of being hailed on the street.
Internet chatrooms started by TNC drivers give credence to such claims as they are filled with discussions about how to pick up non-app fares for cash and also how to spot and avoid undercover officers trying to catch them in the act. In Denver several drivers were fined over $13,000 each as part of a sting to catch ride-for-cash drivers. But the real question may be, do all the TNC drivers really understand the rules and laws that govern them?
After her incident last week, Bufe was left with questions about her company’s policies and training.
Ride-booking service companies have boomed in the last several years. So much so, that the Colorado state legislature passed, and Gov. Hickenlooper signed, Senate Bill 14-125 into law on June 5, 2014 with the purpose of regulating ride-booking service operations such as Lyft. One of the provisions of the Colorado law prohibits TNC drivers from soliciting or accepting any passengers who have waived them down in a traditional taxi “street hail,” specifically requiring the driver to arrange rides through the digital network provided by the application platform.
“I wouldn’t call it really unusual that this guy tried to hail me down,” Bufe says. She frequently gets waved down on the Hill. She says she stops because it gives her the chance to get new customers to download the app, an activity encouraged by the company, which pays her a $10 bonus for each new customer she brings in. Bufe says she’s registered at least 10 other people like she attempted to do with the man on July 16. It seems logical that stopping for a street hail for a mustached car is the obvious way to find new customers. And as stated previously, Adam, Lyft’s safety specialist, did not inform her she did anything wrong with regards to the dashboard tape showing her stopping for a street hail. He simply writes, “In the future, and to protect your own safety, you may want to avoid letting people into your vehicle who you aren’t paired with in the app.” The word “may” would seem to imply that this last recomendation is purely a suggestion and not a policy.
Lyft’s stated position on street hails is at least clearer in word if not incentives.
“Drivers are prohibited from accepting street hails, that’s one of the things that differentiates Lyft from a taxi,” says Paige Thelen, communications manager for Lyft. “Drivers are instructed of that rule when they sign on as drivers. … It’s during the onboarding process that it’s communicated to them.”
However, Bufe doesn’t recall being told not to pick up hails, only not to accept cash rides and the regulation isn’t specifically listed on the Colorado-specific driver requirements page of the Lyft website.
“Nowhere across the country in any city is it permissible for a driver to pick up a street hail. That’s just a rule that we have not specifically outlined for Colorado but a rule we have for every Lyft driver,” Thelen says. She then provided a blog post under a driver-only blog site, The Hub, dated February 2015, which instructs drivers to refuse street hails because “Not only do street hails threaten your own safety, they can also get you in trouble with the law: Officials have started cracking down on unauthorized pickups.”
She also pointed to the company’s extensive Terms of Service agreement, where buried under Driver Representations and Warranties it states, “You will not make any misrepresentation regarding Lyft, the Lyft Platform, the Services or your status as a Driver, or, while providing the Services, operate as a public carrier or taxi service, accept street hails, charge for rides (except as expressly provided in this Agreement), or engage in any other activity in a manner that is inconsistent with your obligations under this Agreement.”
Bufe says she signed the terms of service electronically and doesn’t have a copy of it.
Speaking of the incident last week she says, “I asked the guy if he wanted to sign up for Lyft, and he said yes. I’m not trying to go off the platform or accept street hails … I was trying to get a new Lyft customer, which is what Lyft calls ‘spreading Lyft love.’ That’s why they send you the referral cards to begin with so that you’ll go out there and recruit new customers while you’re out and about. How do you do that if you never talk to strangers?”
The Lyft site does recommend drivers suggest downloading the app to patrons who ask for a ride but aren’t already signed up. But a search of Lyft’s website and policies did not turn up a specific policy stating that such fares should remain outside of the cab until the app is downloaded and credit-card information has been processed by the system. It is this apparent flaw in the system that may be exposing TNC drivers like Bufe, who may be following the letter of the law unlike many of their fellow TNC drivers, to unnecessary dangers.
When asked if Lyft had any specific policy on this matter Thelen responded by email, “our Terms of Service outline our full policy on this matter.” A search of the terms found no policy on keeping fares outside the vehicle prior to downloading the app.
In addition, Bufe says the company never gave her any formal Lyft training, never sent her a manual or policy guidelines but only directed her to the help center on the webpage, which is “barebones to say the least,” she says. Before Bufe was approved as a Lyft driver, she did meet with a “mentor” who she claims inspected her vehicle, rode with her around the block and then gave his approval. She laughed when asked about the meeting, which she says lasted all of 10 minutes.
“I’ve never seen him again,” she says, “he never gave me his contact information [and] he is in no way a mentor. You don’t have anybody to answer questions.”
Bufe was also unaware of Lyft’s noweapon policy, which is clearly stated on the website. She only found out as part of her email exchange with Adam following the incident.
In the emails Bufe asks Adam several times to clarify the Lyft weapons policy, specifically asking what classifies as a weapon and what doesn’t. “I just purchased a 500 lumen SureFire flashlight to shine in a threatening person’s face, because of Weds night. Is that permissible to do, if he’s a threat? It’s non contact,” her email states. She also asks about pepper-spray, a wrench and a pencil.
Adam responds by sending Bufe a link to the no-weapons policy on the website, which states “if any driver or passenger possesses a weapon in a Lyft vehicle, regardless of whether possession is legal where they are, they will be removed from the platform … Lyft reserves sole judgement on what constitutes a ‘weapon.’”
“I’m going to say that’s probably my responsibility that I didn’t read it. But you don’t get a lot of guidance on Lyft,” she says.
Adam never responded to Bufe’s repeated questions about what constitutes a weapon.
Bufe does recall that as part of her training she received instructions not to take cash for rides and to watch out for “Lyftjacking” or mistakenly picking up the wrong passenger. This information came via the company’s Lyft Community Digest emails.
Even so, she summarizes her frustration about her perceived lack of training: “The idea that there is a woman out there driving and she may need different guidance [than] a male driver, that is what I feel like is missing from all of this.”
Thelen says the safety of all their drivers and passengers is of utmost priority to the company, as is equal opportunity for women, given that 30 percent of their drivers, 60 percent of their passengers and 50 percent of their leadership are women.
As to the traumatic incident that has made Bufe take a hard look at her career as a TNC driver, she told Adam in their email exchange, “I don’t know what else I should have done in this situation.”
While it’s impossible for Lyft and other TNC companies to keep all of their drivers, women or men, completely safe in all situations, it does seem reasonable that if decreasing street hails is actually a priority as the companies profess, then making the cars less recognizable (mustache, etc.) would seem a common sense step in the right direction.
And if Bufe’s case is any indication, companies may also want to increase their driver training for new hires.
Finally, creating stated terms of service that require all fares to remain outside the vehicle until the app download process is complete would serve to close a dangerous loophole in a system that has openly courted women drivers by claiming that it is safer than driving a traditional cab.
