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It's Harder To Get an Uber or Lyft If You're Black, Study Says (time.com)
Black riders have to wait "significantly longer" for their Uber cabs and experience "double" the cancellation rates of white passengers, according to a new study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The study, which also observed a similar pattern among Lyft drivers, claims it has found "significant evidence of racial discrimination" in ride-hailing services based on a pair of experiments in Seattle and Boston. From a report on Time: Researchers pulled data from more than 1,400 field tests conducted using mostly Uber and Lyft, but also traditional taxi services. The findings in Boston and Seattle showed evidence of discrimination that manifested in either longer waits or a higher likelihood for cancellation. In Seattle, African-American UberX users on average waited 5 minutes and 15 seconds for pick-ups -- roughly 30% longer than white riders, who waited 4 minutes on average. Lyft users did not experience a significant difference during the experiment. When the research assistants switched between using white-sounding and African-American-sounding names, they did not find a significant increase in their wait times. But the overall rates at which drivers canceled the ride after it was assigned to them was more than one in 10 for riders with black-sounding names, roughly double than for riders with white-sounding names.
>Are you saying that you can tell someone's race by their name? But if races are social constructs and not real, what are they really measuring?
Prejudice.
>can't tell heritage by name
You really can't tell if someone who has a french, indian, polish, italian heritage by their last name? You need to get out more.
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BMO
...do their apps specify race when you are reserving a ride?
Or maybe it's because the pick up point is in a high crime area.
According to TFS (yeah, I know), the results varied on whether the rider's name "sounded" black or white.
"Elon" (as in Elon Musk).
He's an African-American from South Africa.
Most blacks tend to live in black neighborhoods
Actually, they don't. Most blacks live in neighborhoods with sizable populations of white, Hispanic, etc. At the last census, only 28% of blacks lived in neighborhoods that were at least 85% black.
Or maybe it's because the pick up point is in a high crime area.
No. The study controlled for that. The pickup locations were the same.
That's so 1990s. The modern SJW definition is "prejudice plus power" which is how they exclude minorities from being racist even when they are blatantly racist by the older definition. See, a black Uber driver may be very very prejudiced.. but he has no power, due to the assumption of a white supremacist society propped up by structural racism etc... so he's not racist.
Furthermore, if you're black and your last name is "smith" it's likely that it was the name of the family that owned your ancestors.
Which is why the whole "Shaniqua" thing. It's why Malcolm X used the name he used - to abandon the "slave name."
It's not a "stupid" cultural thing. There is a rationale behind it if you bother to even use google for 5 minutes (I knew this when I was 5. Before the Internet. Back when people had to travel miles to call me an asshole. Up hill. Both ways. In the snow.).
Knowing history makes the world less confusing.
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BMO
Maybe they're reacting from experience and don't want to visit certain neighborhoods
This is actually insightful, but not in the way the author and mods probably think.
The thing is, the people of color I've seen comment about Uber almost all love the heck of out it. Sure, they get double the turndowns a white rider might get, but they can actually eventually get a ride with Uber. Taxis flat out refuse to go into their neighborhood. Plus, an Uber driver that refuses a rider in a way that rider finds unfair is pretty much guaranteed to get a bad review, dropping their driver rating. That's really important to drivers, so there's incentive to not be a douchebag that taxi drivers don't have.