Page 14 - drive a2b march 2020 web

VICTORIA
NEWS R OD BAR T ON, MP

Let's stop this
game of "taxi,

not taxi", and

call it what it is.

I
spoke with 3AW's Neil Mitchell last month
about the need for commercial passenger
vehicles to be easily identified.

In 2019 there were a number of cases where drivers,
posing as rideshare, had picked up young girls and raped
or assaulted them. One driver, had used an A4 photo of a
registered driver to bypass the app's driver identification
process. Another incident involved an opportunist predator
Rod Barton MLC
Leader, Transport Matters Party who pulled up next to a girl and pretended to be the Uber she
was waiting for.

Every time we post a story about these events on our social
media channels we get two common comment themes. The
frustrated taxi industry turns up to the debate with calls for
branded vehicles and built-in safety measures, all good ideas
resulting from years of work to make the taxi industry safe.
But the message from the rideshare industry is very different.

Many say it's the girls' own fault. That they should have
checked the car they were getting into. They should make
sure it had a CPV sticker in place, that the driver was the
same person in the photo on their app, that the registration
numbers matched, that the driver knew their name and where
they were going.

These comments make me hang my head in shame.
This is not the fault of these victims. This is the fault of a
regulatory environment that has normalised getting into
unmarked vehicles with strangers. This is the fault of a
system that values cheap over safe and has promoted digital

14 DRIVE A2B magazine · March 2020