The reason taxis are brightly marked and highly identifiable is for the safety of the public.  If one cuts you off, you know exactly who to call to complain.  If you receive sub-par serviceyou can call the office and they can trace who your driver was if you give them any small bit of information and then reprimand, train, or punish the driver.  Believe me, my company doesn’t want bad drivers working for us.  We want to train them to be better at their jobs or weed them out so that everyone else in the company can make more money through having a good reputation and regular riders.

The theme from this past weekend seemed to be Uber and Lyft drivers EVERYWHERE in the city, but mainly directly in front of me driving like fucking morons.  Madison has a load of multiple laned one-way streets, and all the Uber and Lyft drivers were taking sharp left turns from the right lanes, stopping in the middle of the street to load and unload passengers, and generally driving like they weren’t familiar with the city and common destinations.  These drivers were recognizable to me because all their passengers were in the back seats and their cell phones were prominently mounted on their dash boards with the apps running.

Now if only ANY of them had someone I could call to bitch about their dangerously inept driving so that they could get trained, reprimanded, or disciplined.  About once a year some college kid gets hit by a car who isn’t paying attention.  Sometimes these kids die.  If the driver is an Uber or Lyft driver the next time this happens, no one will be insured, and that will compound how sucky this situation will be.

This past weekend something really sucky happened.  Woman tells police Uber driver inappropriately touched her | News – Channel3000.com.  This is a very short article and the last couple sentences are scary as fuck.  This driver is basically unidentifiable.  He’ll be working next weekend, most likely.  Who’s driving you?