The Sleazy Side of Small City Ride Sharing
Reposted from my Medium page. Follow me @kcudd.
My family and I travel quite a bit, which means we frequently find ourselves piled into a car with a ride share service of one kind or another. Lyft is our preferred provider but of course we have taken rides in Uber and tons of other local services in cities that restrict access to the major players.
For the most part, ride share drivers care about their rider’s experience. They keep a clean car. They adjust the temperature to suit your comfort level. They engage in polite converstation, or not, depending on your preference. In bigger cities, we almost always have a great ride during which we feel safe and comfortable. That is not the case in the small city where we live. Many of the the drivers here don’t give a crap about rider experience.
We have had dangerous, disgusting, awkward and horribly smelling rides in and around South Bend, Indiana, where we currently reside. So awful have some of these rides been that we are almost willing to spend 10 times the amount of money on parking at the airport to avoid these gross and risky rides. Almost.
Over the year and half that we have lived here, we have had some real head scratching rides and I mean that literally. Some of these cars have been so nasty that I wouldn’t be the slightest bit surprised if we picked up a parasite in them. I’m fairly certain we caught the flu in one and honestly, I was happy it was just the flu.
It was 4 am in the small bedroom community where we live. Our family of four was ready to pile into a car to catch our flight home to Texas for Christmas. We call a Lyft and feel fortunate that a driver will be there in 15 minutes.
You see, sometimes you can’t get a ride at all. The airport is “far away” at 23 minutes door-to-door and there just aren’t that many drivers in the area. This is one of the reasons, I suppose, that they get away with taking such crappy care of their customers. How so, you ask?
Once we had a driver whose car reeked of cigarette smoke so much so that my kids were coughing uncontrollably right there in the car. He even had a cup filled with floating butts and merky, smelly ash water he’d used to put said cigarettes out. I don’t care that the man is a smoker. But if you are going to ask people to pay to ride in your car, you may want to remove that source of stank. There is not enough room on your rear view to hang sufficient Little Trees to cover that up. Take care of your riders, man!
One time we were coming home late from the airport. It was raining pretty hard. The driver was going slow, which I would appreciate for safety’s sake, but this was extreme. He was crawling down the tollroad going way under the speed limit. On top of that, every window and his windsheild were so densly fogged up you could barely see through them. What’s the deal? Put on the defrost and pick up the pace, dude!
Another time we had a guy who was cranking the AC, even though it was about 40 degrees out. We asked him to turn it down and he did. But then he opened the windows instead. My hair was whipping around my face and the car was filled with frigid Michiana fall air. That same guy had his trunk chock full of garbage. Actual trash bags and fast food containers and what not. We could barely fit our bags into the trunk.
Once, we opened the door to our ride share and it was a scene straight out of Cheech and Chong. The smell of marijuana just about knocked us over. In we climbed, because we desperately wanted to get home, and she proceeded to drive 20 mph or less, missing turns left and right, because, obviously, she was totally stoned. Again, I’m not judging what she does. But she shouldn’t pick up passengers while high as a freaking kite!
The worse one happened that time at 4 am.
A minivan pulls into the driveway. We herd the boys out the door, booster seats in hand, and tell them to load up. My husband takes the front, the boys take the middle captain’s chairs, and I make my way to the back bench. To get there, I have to wade through garbage that is completely covering the floor. There were layers, like an actual dump. I’m pushing through it, thankful for the protection provided of my big giant Uggs, rolling my eyes and trying not to think about it too much. I want to go to Texas and this is the only driver who will take us to the airport.
I take my seat and go to put my water bottle in the cup holder, which I should have held in my hands in retrospect. It was 4 in the morning…I wasn’t exactly at my sharpest. Something was stopping the bottle from settling into the cup holder. Horrified, I discover that the item blocking my bottle is a lollipop stick, complete with the remants of chewed up candy and coated in whatever pathogens some child was carrying around.
The heat was blasting out of every vent making me feel suffocated, especially considering my growing anxiety about the condition of this minivan. I employed the tactic I must often use on ride shares in South Bend. I went deep inside myself, using the opportunity to practice meditation. Focus on the breath. Breathe in, breath out. But don’t breathe too deeply. Surely there is an airborne virus in here.
We arrive at the airport, trek through the layer of food cartons, tissues, papers, and who knows what else to free ourselves from this disgusting start to our family Christmas. All was fine. Or so we thought.
A day later, my healthy, energetic, vibrant five year old collapsed face down in an armchair, walkie talkie in hand, in the middle of a raukus round of hide-n-seek with his brother and cousins. Burning with fever, coughing, aching, congested ears, and more, he was one sick puppy.
Then I was. And the family starting dropping like flies. It spread one by one to a total of 7 other people in our immediate circle. And it clung to us like the film that coated that man’s minivan windows for 10 terrible days. I had to be roused from my sweat soaked sick bed to sort out Santa gifts on Christmas Eve. It sucked. And it started a day after riding in that nasty ass minivan.
Coincidence? I think not.
So frequent are our weird and outlandish experiences, it’s become a game of sorts as we wait to see what mess of a ride share we are going to get this time in South Bend. Will we get the filthy vehicle but nice enough person variety or the stoned out of her mind and night blind version? Are we going to fall ill and wish for death or just die tonight in a fiery car crash? Maybe we will get an all new kind of nasty or incompetent. One really never knows.
It makes you wonder which option is truly safer, rolling the ride share dice or driving after we’ve had drinks with dinner. For now, we keep on ride sharing, hoping that demand in the area will grow and cleaner, safer rides will follow. Until then, we will ride with whomever shows up, arm ourselves with sanitizer and face masks, and collect more stories to share.
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