WEEKEND EDITION- Uber’s Possible Drug Mule Problem, The Deadliest Road in America

Published Jan 1, 2023, 9:50 AM

This is a compilation of some of the most compelling stories of the week.

Welcome to the Daily Dive Weekend edition. I'm Oscar Ramirez, and every week I explore the top stories making waves in the news and some that are just playing interesting. I'll connect you with the journalists and the people who know the story and bring you news without the noise so you can make an informed decision. You can catch a new episode of The Daily Dive every Monday through Friday, and it's ready when you wake up. On the weekend edition, I'll be bringing you some of the best stories from the week. Uber has a courier service called Uber Connect, where you can have a package picked up at one location and delivered to another. Drivers don't know what's inside the package, but some suspect they may be being used to transport drugs and other prohibited items. Drivers can cancel deliveries, but some feel compelled to go through with suspicious deliveries for safety concerns since the customers often have their first name, photo, license plate, and vehicle description. For more on how some of these drivers fear they may be being used as unwitting drug mules, will speak to David Ingram, tech reporter at NBC News. What I heard speaking to drivers for Uber is really they're concerned about their safety. So oftentimes they'll drive for multiple apps or multiple services. They'll do passenger rides. And then there are also those who do what's known as Uber connects, and they will get what they considered to be suspicious requests. So I spoke with one person who was driving for Uber Connect in Arizona. They said they got a request from a customer in order to deliver a package from one motel to another motel at one am. They thought that was suspicious. Yeah, yeah, one and one and two really, and they dropped off the package. It didn't seem like there was much in it, and they dropped it off to somebody who appeared really nervous, and they decided, you know, based on that and some other factors, they decided to stop driving, first for Uber Connect and then for Uber all together. So these drivers all have kind of wild stories about the minds of things are being asked to deliver at the times of day, you know. One person said that they had a DVD, a single DVD case they were asked to deliver, and it was an a Nicolas Cage film and when the driver shook the case, it seemed to have something in it. Other than a DVD. So Uber rules prevent them from tampering or opening packages, but clearly their suspicions are heightened. And in the first example that you were talking about in Arizona, so it was just a plastic bag that they were delivering with a pen, some candy in a box about the size of two decks of cars that was covered in an excessive amount of tape. So, I mean, these are those tell tale signs of it could be something pretty bad in there. And as you mentioned, Uber says you shouldn't be opening the packages or tampering with the packages. It reminds me of the Transporter movies with Jason Statham, where you know, one of the rules is never opened the package. You're not supposed to do that. But for a lot of these drivers that curiosity takes over. You get that sense of like, man, there could be something not right in there, and sometimes they try to sometimes they don't. You know, I know a lot of them follow the rules, but we also know that some don't. Yeah. I spoke to one driver in Miami who said that, you know, look, the curiosity just writes her and she wants to know what's in the package. And so she said she had found cannabis as well as adderall and you know, she knew she was breaking sort of Ruber policy, but the phrase that she used was that she thought she was basically being used as a as a drug mule, which is common phrase and for a drug trafficker who's sort of coerced into doing that, And she just wanted to know, like, if if I'm muling, what am I going to be muling for? And you know, these drivers say that they're not paid enough to be hanging around drugs and taking on that risk, whether it's a risk of arrests, whether it's a safety issue, and they feel coerced into making these deliveries because you know, they could go to the police but then and some have done that, of course, but they also say that they're fearful of doing so because by the time they pick up the package and know that it's suspicious from their standpoint, the customer who's handing them the package already has their first name, at least, the making model of their car, the license plate number, you know, other factors that are given to Uber customers. So it works just like the regular passenger apps. So yeah, they give you a lot of information, identifying information to connect with the right person, and yeah, they have that. You can track how the delivery is being made. Also, you know, if you go to the Uber connect website, that's one of the big selling points that you can track in real time how your package is getting there. So these people, you know, if they're sending using the service for nefarious needs, right, they know when you're going off track. So yeah, they're the big safety concern for those drivers, and a financial concern to write because some of the drivers were saying, you know, if you keep canceling deliveries or you know, you get there, you cancel whatever it may be, that you can be penalized and you can be dropped from the app, all all that stuff. So there's a lot of different concerns floating around, that's right. Yeah. So now, Uber of course is not the first package delivery service to face this issue. This has been around as long as any package delivery service really, I mean UPS and FedEx have dealt with similar issues. US Postal Service continues to deal with these issues all the time, and so in a sense, upers just joining a club here. But the drivers also said that they would like to like Uper to to take steps to ensure their safety. So drivers of course go through background checks. They would like maybe customers who use the service to go through background checks, or maybe delimit it to businesses sending packages to customers or to other businesses. So as it stands, the service, you know, anybody can use it to send a packages to anybody else. So, uh, there's not a lot of I mean, there are some safeguards. So I spoke with Uper, people from Uber and you know, their corporate headquarters says that look, we you know, we require the customers to check a box on the app that they understand what the rules are. They understand that they're going to not send prohibited items. There's a list bread the items. They have teens at Uber who are former law enforcement people who can look into these reports. Uber says they've gotten six requests from law enforcement to help to look into potential drugs on the surface. But the drivers the fence book, you said that these precautions that company takes aren't enough for them. Yeah, I mean it seems like as far as from the reporting right and what Uber was saying, you know, if somebody is caught in violation of this stuff, really the worst that happens is they get removed from the app. You can't really use it much more anymore. I mean, if they take it through a law enforcement and something progresses that way, that's a different thing. But for Uber, they'll just kick you off the app. So I mean, that's that's a tough one there to swallow. And then some of the drivers have also said that they feel the support system for reporting suspicious stuff doesn't really live up to it um. You know, one guy in particular said he was transferred twenty seven times when he was trying to flag something, and you know, people on the other side of things just didn't know what to do, like they didn't know how to approach the situation. They didn't. It's it's but the people who are answering the phones for support for Uber, you know, they're not the highest paid employees at Uber, of course, and Uber has acknowledged that, in fact that that in some instances, the people who work on their support teams have fallen down, have not met the expectations of the company to help drivers through these kind of sticky situations. You know, these are complicated situations, asking someone who thinks they're in possession of drugs, should they go to law enforcement to think about their own safety, and you know, law enforcement may or may not be interested. I did hear from a driver who said that that they were turned away by law enforcement because this is with the customer with the driver considered to be suspicious didn't meet their level of being able to open the package. So there's there's that fear too. You know what if no one listens, you know what if what if law enforcement um decides to charge the driver? That may be unlikely, but uh, driver are afraid of that as well. Yeah, the liability question is huge, and for Uber, it seems like the liability for them is pretty low, right, I mean they're just connecting clients to a driver, right, That's kind of what they were talking about when they were the whole discussion around our driver's employees or they just independent contractors. Right, They're saying, we're just the platform connecting people. So the liability for Uber the platform could be pretty low. But for the driver, right, they can be mistaken as being part of a situation like that and they can still be charged and you know they might have legal bills, um. You know, they have all kinds of conserations there that that they don't want to be a part of. Uh. There's an interesting sort of phrase that that comes up in this context, which is the wilful blindness. You know, even if the driver or uber doesn't know directly that what's in the package is drugs, if they are willfully blind the idea that the service is being used this way repeatedly, then um. You know, legal experts I spoke with said that that the company in particular could could be liable in that case. The government may require Uber, demand that Uber take extra steps tipper event um, the service being used this way, that's to be determined. That I did speak with someone from the Drug Enforcement Administration, the federal agency that that would handle something like this, and they're not saying anything at the moment. They declined to comment, but they're certainly awhere of of our reporting and um, and they have looked at similar cases in the past involving FedEx and and EPs. So we'll see what comes to that. David Ingram, Czech reporter at NBC News, thank you very much for joining us, happy to do so. Finally, this week, we'll tell you about the deadliest road in America US nineteen A stretch of highway in Pasco County, Florida. The road has three lanes on both sides with extra turn lanes and a speed limit of forty five to fifty five, making it more a freeway. The road was definitely not built with pedestrians in mind, as crosswalks are few and far between, causing people to often cross wherever they can to access businesses and restaurants along the way. Roads like this are called strodes, meant to be quick thoroughfares to the multiple cities, but also share characteristics with smaller streets places for people to live, shop and eat, and this combination can be deadly for those on foot. For more and what to know, speak to Marin Cogan, senior correspondent at vox Us. Nine Team is a highway that runs from Erie, Pennsylvania, all the way down to about Clearwater, Florida. So it's very long highway, and in Florida in particular, there's this one stretch of it at Pasco County just north of Tampa, sort of a suburb of Tampa, where it's just an incredibly dangerous road for pedestrians. The reason I got interested in the story as I was looking at a study by a handful of researchers who took all of the government's traffic fatality statistics from two thousand and one to two thousand sixteen, and they tried to identify hot spots. So these hot spots for a thousand meters stretches where six or more people had been killed over to eight year periods. And what they found is of sixty pedestrian fatality hot spots in the country, seven of them were on this single stretch of road in Pasco County, Florida. So it is an incredibly dangerous road. But as you mentioned, there are roads like this all across the country. I mean it's places as diversist New York and Albuquerque and Georgia and Los Angeles, It's it's all over the country. So this is a national problem and it's really reflected it by the fact that pedestrian fatalities are on the rise in this country and have been on the rise since the start of the pandemic. And the numbers that you looked out there were from two thousand one to you look at other numbers to just to see if this trend had kept going in and one we also saw increased debts I don't know if that was particularly on this road specifically, but just overall, we were seeing a lot of pedestri in deaths. That's exactly right. So the answer is yes to both of those. So we looked specifically at the data for this particular stretch of road in Pasco County because we wanted to see, as they said, the data only went to sixteen. We wanted to see what happened between sixteen and now, and we found that on this stretch of road at least forty eight people have been killed in crashes involving pedestrians since and then the numbers are also on the rise all across the country. So pedestrian fatalities have been on the rise in this country for the past ten years, but they really spiked starting in the sixty seven. Hundred pedestrians were killed that year and then in pedestrians were killed by drivers across the US and that is the most pedestrians killed in forty years in this country. So it's a big wide road. I think there might be eight or nine lanes across both sides of it. You know, there's a bunch of businesses lining up the all the sides of the street. So you know, as people are walking by, hey, I want to go onto that street. Sometimes people run across without going to the crosswalk because since it's such a long stretch of road, you know, you can go maybe about half a mile before you hit a crosswalk, and if you need to get to that restaurant or whatever it might be over there, you're gonna cut over right now. So describe a little more to us about what this road in particular looks like. So this road, it's something that people who are really interested in traffic engineering and planning call a stroad. So a stroade is something that's trying to be a road in a street at the same time. A street you can think of as like a place where people shop and live and recreates, and you want ideally traffic to be slow in that space because there's going to be a lot of pedestrians and a lot of businesses, and you want people to be able to safely move around without facing high speed cars. A road is meant to get cars quickly through through a place from one point to another. So a stroade is sort of trying to do both and is the worst of both worlds. So what you have is a lot of cars moving very quickly, multiple lands of traffic, really open road that encourages drivers to go very fast, and then you have lots of people walking around as well. So as a part of my reporting, I both drove this road and I walked the road, and I will say it's a very different experience to drive then to walk it. You know, when you're walking it, you really feel the extent to which this road was not designed for you to be walking on it, And when you're driving it you almost feel like, you know, it's hard not to go fast because it's so big and wide open and the sort of queues that's giving you as a driver, or like this is open and this is for me to just go as quickly as possible. So there are roads like this all across the US. I would definitely encourage people to look for these in their own community, places where there's a lot of commercial development, people walking, and also multiple lanes and lots of traffic and people turning. Anytime you have a road like this, you're creating exponential opportunities for drivers to come into conflict with either other drivers or with pedestrians or cyclists. We're talking about US nineteen, right, there in Pasco County in Florida. The speed limit is that's already pretty fast when you're when you want to figure in pedestrians. But like you, just like you said, right, we know people drive so much faster, So I mean, I'm sure they're hitting sixty maybe even seventy in some stretches where they might not see a lot of congestion. That's absolutely right. And another big part of the story, which I touch on in the piece, is that SUVs and trucks have increased the percentage of them that are on the road over the last ten twenty years, So there are more people driving SUVs and trucks, and the SUVs and trucks have gotten much bigger. There's a concept called truck bloat, which kind of refers to, you know, the trucks you see that are bigger and bigger and bigger, and people, you know, buy those for all sorts of reasons. It's very safe for the drivers, it might be very comfortable, might be easy for them to get around, but the unfortunate fact of the matter is those types of vehicles are much more deadly to pedestrians than smaller sedans. And uh, you know, economy and compact cars. So you have these much bigger vehicles on the road, and they're on these roads that are sort of encouraging them to go faster. If there are a lot of pedestrians around, it's sort of free. It's a perfect storm of danger for the pedestrians. You mentioned that you both drove and walked this stretch of road. Over about a fifteen mile stretch, you came across twelve or more signs commemorating people that have died there, people that were in incidents where pedestrians got killed. I mean that's almost every mile that you would see a little memorial there. And you did get a chance to speak to some people who had lost loved ones. Tell me a little bit about that. I did speak with several people who had lost loved ones. You know, the primary one in my story as a woman named Julie, whose brother Kevin was killed walking the road last year. And you know, her experience was symbolic of the experience of what many other people faced, which is feeling like this thing that happened this this depth of their loved ones didn't need to happen. It didn't need to happen this way. It's it's the results of designs that are dangerous and then people being reckless and and not wanting to face face the consequences of their own recklessness. So her family was really devastated by it. She told me how it was really hard for the family to gather after they lost her brother, and her mom would even um. I thought this would really was really sweet. He was her brother was cremated, and her mom would bring his remains, you know, with her to family events because she couldn't bear to not have him there. I was really moved by that story and just the way that this affects so many people's lives. I know, there's always kind of things in the work to add, you know, more stop signs and better lighting and everything. But what do you do once these some of these roads have already been set out there and like you mentioned, just aren't designed for pedestrian traffic at all. Yeah, that's a really great question. So there is a there is a growing sort of body of criticism of the way that our roads are designed by engineers and planners, and there's this growing sense that we need to design roads that take people into account who exists outside of the car, So people who are not just drivers. There are lots of people who can't drive for one reason or another, who maybe walking or riding a bike, and we need to make sure that the roads are stay for them too, and that you know, the design doesn't reflect this idea that the road is only for vehicles and it's for them to go as fast and as quickly as possible. So some of those ideas. There are ways to calm traffic down. There are ways to make cars go slower. We could narrow roads, we could introduce certain road features that will help slow people down. There are speed governors that could be used in cars to help slow people down. And then there's also you know, questions of infrastructure. What can we add to create safe spaces for pedestrians and cyclists. All of those things I think would be tremendously helpful. But the approach we have now is basically like, well, let's just add on another lane and see what happens. Let's just add this one thing and see what happens. That's not really a radical enough approach to change anything. And I think you know what you often end up having are these sort of Frankenstein roads where they just keep adding and adding and adding and adding it doesn't actually solve the problem. It just makes the road bigger and in some cases even makes the problem worse. So, I mean, the good news about this is that there are actually a lot of things that can be done. It's finding the political will to change it and to say, you know, this isn't normal. Our pedestrian fatality rates are higher than in other comparable countries. We need to change this, and we need to prioritize it. And once we start doing that as a people, I think, you know, there's a lot of opportunity to make our road safer. Marin Cogan, Senior correspondent at Vox, thank you very much for joining us. Thanks so much for having me. That's it for this weekend. Be sure to check out The Daily Dive every Monday through Friday. Join us on social media at Daily Dive pot on Twitter and Daily Dive Podcast on Facebook. Leave us a comment, give us a rating, and tell us the stories that you're interested in. Follow The Daily Dive and I Heard Radio, or subscribe wherever you get your podcast. This episode of The Daily Dive has been engineered by Tony Sargentina. I'm Oscar Ramirez in Los Angeles and this was your daily dive weekend edition Fash