Rideshare safety is no longer just about getting from point A to point B. For many riders, especially women and teens, it’s about calculating risk before the car even arrives.
Senior Nicole Zheng describes the mental checklist she goes through before getting into an Uber or Lyft: where to sit, whether the doors unlock from the inside, how close the driver sits. These precautions have become routine, quietly accepted as part of the price of convenience.
“There are so many protocols that you have to really think about if you’re gonna hop into a car,” Zheng said.
Court records revealed that from 2017 to 2022, Uber received 400,000 reports of sexual assault or sexual misconduct in the United States. This averages one report roughly every eight minutes.
As a result, women make up as little as 14% of Uber drivers, working fewer hours on average than men. The earliest of these reports date back to 2014, peaking between 2017 and 2020.
Uber responded by including background checks in April 2018 and adding a women-preference option in July 2025. Meanwhile, the total trips in the United States fell to 650 million in 2020, down from 1.4 billion trips in 2019.
Uber’s “Women Preferences” is a safety-focused feature that allows women riders and drivers to request or accept matches exclusively with other women. It mirrors the need for control over who is behind the wheel.
Waymo pushes that logic even further. It removes the most unpredictable variable in transportation — the human driver. For riders like junior Sofia Johari, that absence is exactly what makes the experience feel safer. After using Waymo dozens of times, they came to the conclusion that the car’s behavior itself builds trust.
“It definitely feels a lot safer than being around someone that I don’t know,” Johari said.
While some shy away from Waymo due to the novelty of autonomous driving, actual riders have a different perspective on the lack of human input on driving.
“The Waymo doesn’t get road rage, it just slows down and lets them pass,” Johari said. “I can also trust that it’s not gonna do anything rash.”
Safety concerns begin long before the car pulls up to the curb. The female-driver option interrupts that pattern by easing some of the precautions riders have come to expect.
“It’s also just beneficial for female drivers because … there are not that many female drivers right now — [and] we all understand why,” Zheng said. “It’s just not very safe to have a stranger in your car. It would just be better because … there would be more female drivers and then that also increases female customers for the app.”
Still, the feature has limits.
“It makes sense, but it doesn’t solve all of the concerns with riding in a car of someone you don’t know,” Johari said. ”You don’t know if the person’s been drinking or if the person is really angry … or if they’re depressed. And these can all impact how safe a person is when they’re driving. So just because someone’s a woman doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re [going to] be a safe driver.”
This is where Waymo becomes more than just an alternative. It becomes a comparison point. While technology introduces its own risks, including system failures like the San Francisco power outage that temporarily shut down autonomous vehicles, reminding riders that technology can malfunction too. A driverless car may not act impulsively, but it can still stop working.
But unlike Waymo, human-driven rideshares are already embedded in daily life across most cities. For riders who rely on these services now, the issue is less about when autonomous vehicles will arrive and more about how safety can be improved right now. Options like requesting a female driver do not erase every risk, but they ease a level of fear that has become routine for many riders.
The female-driver feature represents progress, revealing the limits of solutions built around human drivers. After implementing the female driver option, Uber states that reports of serious sexual assaults on its platform have fallen by 44% since it began publishing safety reports in 2019.
Currently, 20% of Uber drivers are female — up from the all-time low of 14% in 2015.
The new feature makes rides feel safer without fully removing the danger that causes that fear in the first place. However, Waymo introduces a different kind of question altogether: whether the future of rideshare safety lies in achieving additional screening and features — or in eliminating the driver entirely.
Choosing between imperfect technology and imperfect people is not a simple trade-off. The female-driver option may not eliminate the risk entirely, but it acknowledges it — returning a sense of control to riders in a system where it has been limited.
As technology continues to develop, that tension is becoming harder to ignore. And for riders like Johari and Zheng, the answer isn’t theoretical — it’s shaped by every ride they choose to take.
