Originally Posted by
MSPeconomist
What prevents an uber driver from letting some other individual drive in his/her place, just like a taxi driver can lend his/her taxi license to another individual? At least the displayed taxi license has a photo of the driver as well as the name and taxi license number that the passenger can record.
Have you ever tried examining the photo in taxis? And in Australia at least, they only display first name.
In practice, in somewhere like Melbourne, that means a lot of Mohammeds sharing driving duties in any one cab.
Which as it happened, was the name of my last Uber driver in London. But I also had his phone number, had spoken to him on it beforehand, and his photo was easily seen and examined on my phone rather than squinting at a tiny picture above the mirror. Not to mention his car licence plate. All recorded without any intent on my behalf.
Unless you habitually record taxi drivers' names, numbers and photos as you enter the taxi, you are not going to have all this info at hand should some incident occur.
Chatting to Mohammed and asking him how Uber was working for him, he put it succinctly: I get better passengers, and you get better drivers.