A passenger boarding an Uber car at Bishan Junction 8. Private-hire operators cannot pick up street-hailing customers, who make up 80 percent of cab trips.
Are private-hire drivers more likely to get into accidents than regular motorists?
If you ask the majority of your car-owning friends or colleagues, chances are they’ll have plenty of stories about their encounters with private-hire drivers on the roads. And chances are, most of them portray private-hire drivers as a menace to other motorists.
To be fair, not all drivers are perfect. Everybody has had a bad experience with a careless cabby, reckless driver and motorcyclist with a death wish.
But if you’ve ever wondered why so many private-hire drivers are getting into accidents, we’ve got the top three reasons for you.
Many private-hire drivers are inexperienced.
A lot of private-hire drivers are young and don’t have much experience behind the wheel. They may be drawn to working in the private-hire industry because they’ll have access to cars, which, apart from being used to earn money, gives them more personal freedom and mobility.
An inexperienced driver isn’t necessarily a reckless one, but he or she may not have developed enough situational awareness to deal with dynamic traffic situations.
Remember, all it takes is a moment of inattention (which can happen when they’re fiddling with the smartphone app to accept jobs) for a mishap to occur. If the car in-front suddenly brakes and it takes the private-hire driver a split-second longer to respond by also braking, that lost moment could mean the difference between avoiding a crash or being part of a chain collision.
