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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..
. Hanno Labuschagne.
