“Safety through Technology” has been a scam
Young women accepted a ride from a strange man in an unmarked car because they had the idea it was an OK thing to do…their guard wasn’t up; they had no guard.
There was a time when elected officials and consumers believed that ground transportation would be made not just safer, but virtually foolproof through technology alone.
Booking a ride through an app meant that both the passenger’s information and the driver’s information would be documented, recorded, and available to police if needed. Riders loved watching the little cartoon car moving across the screen to pick them up, as in a child’s video game.
Women could ride easy, knowing that the man behind he wheel would never dare accost them or even simply say something rude, thereby risking a one-star rating and/or a quick automated complaint to corporate headquarters.
A decade ago, we were told technology was going to take the place of more than 300 years experience and common sense in regulating transportation for compensation, and the (mostly) men who work in it. In-person training and testing has been replaced with remote online training; the process of renting or leasing a commercial vehicle from a rightfully suspicious and cautious garage owner has been replaced with simply uploading a piece of identification.
Fast forward to the end of 2025, and we can now see that the “Safety through Technology” myth, pervasive as it is, is nothing but a sad joke. Worse, the propagation of this myth has been truly harmful as cultures around the globe have dropped their rational, natural guard against “Stranger Danger” and encouraged vulnerable persons to take outrageously dangerous risks, throwing caution to the wind in the belief technology would magically protect them.
Propagation of this myth has been truly harmful as cultures around the globe have dropped their rational, natural guard against “Stranger Danger” and encouraged vulnerable persons to take outrageously dangerous risks, throwing caution to the wind in the belief technology would magically protect them.
To begin with, and most importantly, everyone must be aware that the technology has been hacked, and now compromised. No one has any idea of who is driving the gig-platform vehicle that pulls up.
It’s easy to find social media advertisements of firms and individuals promising to get even the worst de-platformed drivers back to work, with numerous public and private groups where individuals buy, sell, or rent approved Uber and other gig-economy driver accounts. These groups often have laughably explicit name like “Uber Accounts for Sale.”
Last summer, the New York Times reported that Uber averages one sexual assault complaint every eight minutes. Last November in Peel Region, two young women were offered rides by a man claiming to be an Uber driver; he took them to a nearby conservation area and raped them.
The fact that he wasn’t even an Uber driver should give readers pause: these young women were so confident that Uber’s technology had made the world a safer place, they accepted a ride from a strange man in an unmarked car because they had the idea it was an OK thing to do. Their guard wasn’t up; they had no guard.
In March 2025, a young girl who had fallen asleep on the back bench of her family’s Uber went missing when the driver inadvertently drove away with her, not realizing she was still in the van.
Uber refused to provide that driver’s cell phone number to the child’s mother or Toronto police. Technology didn’t help that kid, her mother, or police AT ALL. (In fact, 68 cop cars were involved in the effort to quickly identify and locate the vehicle in Toronto’s west end using the oldest technology available: their eyes.)
Our confidence that technology is making the world a safer place and ground transportation a safer industry must rightfully have been blown to smithereens on November 1st, 2025.
That was the night a lovely 20-year-old real estate agent, Kourtney Khan, died in the back seat of a Lyft vehicle. The Lyft was t-boned by an apparently drunk teen-aged driver, who collided with such force it killed the Lyft driver in the front seat.
No technology alerted Lyft corporately to the fact that one of its vehicles, ostensibly on an active run (unless it was a fake account, which doesn’t improve this story any) suddenly wasn’t going anywhere and never completed its run. Lyft apparently didn’t receive any remote information that the vehicle was stopped and that in fact, its driver was dead – God rest his soul.
Emergency vehicles arrived on scene, and the smashed-up Lyft vehicle was loaded onto a flatbed trailer and transported to a Peel Police impound lot. Kourtney Khan was still in the back seat, with the cell phone she had used to book the Lyft ride. Lyft apparently knew none of this; it was Kourtney’s parents who found her through a shared GPS tracing service that tracked her whereabouts to the scene of the accident.
12 hours after the accident, Kourtney’s body was located in the back seat of the impounded vehicle. She was dead; however, no one knows if she was alive when the Lyft vehicle was moved to the flatbed trailer. Possibly her life could have been saved if human eyes had done a thorough inspection of the back seat; possibly not. No one knows.
What we DO know, however, is that all the platform corporations’ leading-edge, state-of-the-art, highly-advanced, ultra-modern proprietary technology did nothing for Kourtney Khan.
My heart breaks at the thought of the agony her parents will endure, spending the rest of their lives wondering if she could have been saved.
Ontario and its municipalities threw caution to the wind in 2016, when ground transportation regulations were re-invented wholesale in order to allow American corporations like Uber and Lyft to be legalized. There was absolutely no discussion of passenger safety, consumer protection or crime prevention before these changes were made, at least in part because officials and politicians were selling the idea that the newest technologies would create an environment so safe, we didn’t even need to discuss it.
We DO need to discuss it.
Technology is great, and the Taxi industry has always been among the earliest adopters of new technologies. But a safe environment requires more than digital equipment: it also requires mature, observant human beings with common sense, experience, and a willingness to commit to the constant and never-ending improvement customer service requires.
In the November 6th Fall Economic Statement, the Ford government committed to a “review of the framework” of ground transportation in Ontario. The Canadian Taxi Association immediately responded by stating that it supports this review, which MUST involve law enforcement agencies and the Ministry of the Solicitor General in addition to the Ministry of Transportation.
Now is Ontario’s chance to conduct a fulsome review of ALL aspects of ground transportation – American platform corporations like Uber and Lyft, as well as local Canadian Taxi services like Beck Taxi and Blue Line.
The review must look at compulsive delivery of Accessible services as well as algorithmic pay and surveillance pricing; environmental concerns as well as congestion challenges; passenger safety and crime prevention.
In 2016, Uber was considered a “novel service” using “emerging technologies.” Government officials, elected politicians, insurance companies, law enforcement agencies and the media were willing to ignore even the most basic rules of common sense to give this new idea a try.
In 2026, Ontario has a chance to explore, research, and correct some of the mistakes that have been made, mistakes that have caused grievous harm to the citizens who deserve protection.
I hope they take it.
