Lyft's sexual assault data shows 360 rapes over 3 year span
The company released its community safety report on Thursday.
Lyft tallied 10 deaths and more than 4,100 reports of sexual assault – including hundreds of rapes — during rides on its ride-hailing app in a three-year period, company officials said.
The San Francisco-based company released its "Community Safety Report" Thursday detailing 4,158 reports of sexual assault during rides from 2017 through 2019, including 360 involving rape.
"Put simply, even one of these incidents is too many," the report says. "That is what drives our relentless work to continuously improve safety for riders and drivers."
In this photo illustration, the Lyft logo is seen displayed on a smartphone. Recently, the company released its community safety report. (Photo Illustration by Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images / Getty Images)
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The report from January 2017 through December 2019 lists five subcategories of sexual assault, ranging from nonconsensual kissing or touching to nonconsensual penetration. Over 99 percent of trips during that span occurred "without any reported safety incidents," including motor vehicle fatalities, assaults or sexual assaults, the company said.
"The safety incidents referenced in this report account for 0.0002% of all trips," Lyft said in the 16-page report.
Ten deaths were tallied from physical assaults in the three-year span on the platform — or a rate of about 1 per every 175,000,000 rides, company data shows. The rate of reported rapes, meanwhile, stood at about 1 in every 5,000,000 trips, according to the data.
All Lyft drivers are screened for criminal offenses and driving infractions prior to being hired. The company also utilizes a third-party firm to conduct further background checks, including a nationwide sex offender registry search.
The Lyft logo is displayed on a car in March 2019 in San Francisco, Calif. Recently, the company released its safety report, which included how many sexual assaults occurred over the past three years. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images / Getty Images)
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"Lyft’s driver screening process adheres to – and in many cases goes beyond – all applicable local regulations and requirements," company officials said. "Any driver who does not pass the initial background check, annual check and continuous monitoring is barred from driving with Lyft."
The data comes two years after Lyft’s ride-hailing rival, Uber, said it tallied 5,981 reports of sexual assault in 2017 and 2018. Lyft had previously said its report would come shortly after Uber’s, but the company did not immediately provide comment on the timing of its release, the Washington Post reported.
Uber tallied 3,045 reports of sexual assault, including 464 rapes, in 2018 – the latest full year in its report, compared to 1,807 by Lyft in 2019, the most recent year in its data.
Uber is expected to release its second safety report later this year, while Lyft has yet to commit to put out additional reports, CNN reported.
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Rachel Adams, an attorney representing about 1,000 sex assault victims in a lawsuit against the ride-hailing giants, said Lyft’s data release was long overdue, the New York Times reported.
"We’ve all been waiting for it," Adams told the newspaper while calling for Lyft to install video surveillance in its vehicles. "They are not implementing the safety measures to prevent this from happening, and it’s just going to keep mounting."