Survey Finds Most Women Have Felt Unsafe During Rideshare Trips

A nationwide survey reveals that nearly 3 in 5 women have felt unsafe during a rideshare trip. The survey, reported by KNSI, comes amid ongoing concerns about passenger safety as Uber and Lyft continue to face sexual assault lawsuits across the country.

The survey was conducted by A Case for Women through Pollfish and found that 59.3% of women who use rideshare services have felt unsafe at least once. It also found that 72.3% of women use fake phone calls or deceptive texting as a safety tactic when riding alone at night, a sign that many female passengers have developed their own informal safety routines outside of rideshare companies’ built-in app features.

The findings come as rideshare safety remains under national legal scrutiny. Uber is facing more than 3,000 sexual assault lawsuits consolidated in federal multidistrict litigation, with the first federal bellwether trial resulting in an $8.5 million verdict against the company earlier this year. Lyft is also facing federally consolidated sexual assault litigation, though the Lyft MDL is much smaller. The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation’s decision to centralize Lyft passenger sexual assault cases in federal court nevertheless signals that the claims share enough common factual issues to warrant coordinated pretrial handling.

According to the survey, frequent rideshare users reported unsafe experiences more often than occasional users. Among women who use rideshare services weekly, 33% said they had felt unsafe on multiple occasions, compared with 15.4% of occasional users. Gen Z women also reported repeated unsafe experiences at higher rates than older women, with 29.6% reporting multiple unsafe incidents compared with 10.3% of Baby Boomers.

The survey also highlighted underreporting. Among women who said they had felt unsafe, 35.6% said they never reported the incident to the rideshare company or to authorities. The most common reason was uncertainty over whether the incident was serious enough to report, followed by lack of trust that the company would take the complaint seriously and fear of retaliation from the driver.

The data also showed broad support for government regulation of rideshare safety. About 71.5% of women surveyed said rideshare safety should be regulated by law rather than left to companies to manage internally. Support for legal regulation was highest among Baby Boomers, at 82.8%, and remained strong among weekly riders, with 73.6% supporting regulation.

A Case for Women surveyed 1,000 adult women across the United States who use rideshare services. Participants were asked about their experiences with safety incidents, reporting behavior, trust in rideshare companies, personal safety tactics and views on regulation and corporate accountability.