Ride-hailing firm Uber has assured that it is focused on safety and aims to raise the bar on transport, leveraging ever-evolving technology for safe, reliable, seamless and affordable transport.

The firm has come a long way since 2009, says Uber Global product senior director Sachin Kansal, who was presenting at Uber’s Tech for Safety Summit in August.

By the end of 2018, the ride-hailing application had more than 93-million riders on its platform. This has grown to more than 100-million to date.

The platform serves more than 700 cities in more than 60 countries.

In 2018, 15-billion trips were completed. Since the beginning of the year, the firm had surpassed the 17-billion-trip mark, he said at Uber’s Tech for Safety Summit.

Safety remains at the forefront of the company’s vision of raising the bar on transport for riders, the drivers and the communities the platform serves, he explains.

“With a global footprint and billions of trips, safety is a necessity and must always, like technology, develop.”

Kansal emphasises that safety is always a priority and highlights the key safety features introduced since the launch of the application.

Every trip is GPS-tracked and riders have access to all the relevant information, such as the real-time location of the driver and the pickp-up point.

Consumers using the platform also have the driver’s and the vehicle’s details, as well as access to a two-way rating system that enables accountability across the board.

That was just the beginning in Uber’s approach to safety, as rider safety, driver safety and digital safety evolve within the application.

To ensure rider safety, Uber has rolled out a rider safety toolkit within the application, giving riders access to a ‘safety centre’ awareness platform for information and education, the ability to set up trusted contacts, ‘share my trip’ options, emergency assistance within the application and a ‘check your ride’ push notification feature.

The rider is able to preset up to five trusted contacts, such as friends or family, for location sharing, to whom the trip data, including the driver’s name, the vehicle name and the location, will be sent on tapping the ‘send status’.

The ‘check your ride’ push notifications will remind all riders to verify the licence plate, vehicle make and model and the driver’s photo before starting a trip.

Riders can see the selected driver’s profile, rating, how many trips the driver has completed, how long he or she has been driving and compliments from previous riders, besides others.

Further ensuring safety is the requirement for all potential driver-partners to complete a criminal background screening process before they can accept ride requests through the Uber application.

Both riders and drivers can obtain specially trained incident response teams and emergency assistance support within the application.

The platform alerts the security partners automatically with all the information required, such as location, driver, rider and vehicle details, in an emergency, which means that the riders and drivers will save time by only having to explain the type of emergency.

Uber also extensively focuses on driver safety, which includes a similar driver safety toolkit, also boasting the ‘trusted contacts’ feature, ‘follow my ride’ options, in- application emergency assistance and cash safety features.

Uber also makes cash acceptance the driver’s choice.

Uber verifies riders aiming to pay cash without the provision of a credit card through social media.

“If [a rider] wants to pay cash and does not list a credit card, the rider has to provide some sort of verification,” says Kansal, adding that, in this event and with clear rider permission, Uber leverages Facebook profiles to ensure that the rider is legitimate.

Drivers also need to have control over their accounts and ensure authenticity on a regular basis.

The drivers are occasionally requested to take a selfie for verification through artificial-intelligence-based facial recognition to ensure the person using the account is, in fact, the driver allocated to that account.

While much focus has been on interpersonal safety between driver and rider, the company also focuses on road safety.

To help make roads safer for everyone, Uber automatically locks drivers out of the application for a six-hour period when they reach the consecutive 12-hour driving limit.

After the six-hour rest, the timer will reset and allow the driver access to the platform again.

In addition, Uber features a speed limit alert, which encourages drivers to maintain a safe speed within the local speed limits.

Further, in order to use the Uber platform as a driver, every vehicle must pass an independent yearly inspection to verify that it is roadworthy.

Meanwhile, digital safety includes phone anonymisation and address anonymisation, options to select cross streets as a destination to keep the riders’ office or home address private and two-factor account verification.

Calls and messages made between the rider and driver using the Uber application do not reveal personal phone numbers and use a neutral third-party number instead as a ‘mask’ for both rider and driver.