Would your Parents Let You Ride with a Stranger?
Uber, the taxi service app, is being used by parents to have strangers shuttle their children around.
In today’s busy society, many parents are faced with the tough challenge of balancing work with their kids’ after-school activities. With the creation of countless “taxi service” type apps, many of these parents see an easy opportunity to get their kids from point A to point B without ever having to leave work.
The idea of paying a stranger to drive you around seemed like a crazy idea at first, but turned out to be favorable over a traditional taxi to many people all over the world. The car is cleaner, the driver is friendlier, and anybody with a smartphone can use it. However, the idea of a child sometimes as young as seven years old riding around with a complete stranger without a trusted adult is completely insane.
From a young age, children are told to never take a ride in a car from a stranger. Yet now parents think it is acceptable to pay random strangers to drive their kids around? I would never be able to trust the driver enough to know that they wouldn’t drive off with young children and never be seen again.
Not only is the idea of children using these apps such as Uber completely absurd, it is also against Uber’s terms and conditions. The terms and conditions state that is prohibited for anyone under the age of 18 to ride alone without an adult. Uber even states in these terms and conditions that there may be situations that are “potentially unsafe, offensive, [and] harmful [to] minors.”
Uber isn’t the only app that parents use to move their kids around. One company, Shuddle, drives around kids that can be as young as 7 years old. These drivers not only pick up these children from home, school, etc., but the drivers are also given permission to sign their kids in and out of daycare.
Many parents have fears of their kids stepping out into the streets and hailing down a taxi cab, but when it gets down to specifics, what’s the difference? Both services, whether it be a traditional taxi or a ride sharing app like Uber or Shuddle, require paying random strangers to drive kids around, and both are completely idiotic and unsafe.
