When an Uber Ride Becomes an Emergency
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Weekly. Free. Straight from the driver's seat.
Emily Normandin-Parker was 23 years old. She died after her Uber driver left her and her friend on the side of a highway. She should have gotten home that night. She should be alive.
Leaving them there was a horrible decision by the Uber driver.
But after roughly 16,000 Uber rides, there is another part of this story that people who have never driven for Uber may not fully understand. A $4 or $5 ride can turn into a medical emergency or some other kind of crisis almost instantly. One minute you are simply taking somebody home. The next minute they are vomiting, barely conscious, unable to care for themselves, and you are suddenly making decisions you never expected to make.
I have been there.
That does not excuse what happened to Emily. Understanding the pressure a driver may be under is not the same thing as defending a bad decision. What I am interested in is what happens in the seconds before that decision gets made.
Imagine you are driving at highway speed and a passenger suddenly starts vomiting behind you. Is the person simply drunk? Are they sick? Are they choking? Is this alcohol poisoning? Do you pull over? If so, where? Do you take the next exit? Do you call 911? Can this person safely be left alone?
It is easy to watch a news report the next morning and say exactly what somebody should have done. It is much harder when the situation is unfolding six feet behind you while you are still responsible for driving.
I had a ride like that last winter in Syracuse.
It was around 5:30 in the afternoon, already dark, and the parking lot outside the bar was covered in ice. A younger man walked an older woman toward my car. He was holding her up, and because the lot was so slippery, I assumed he was helping her because of the ice. He opened the door, helped her buckle in, shut the door, and walked back toward the bar.
Then I realized he was not coming with us.
He was the bartender.
In about ten seconds, my $5 Uber ride became something completely different.
At that point, I had three options.
The first was to cancel the ride and try to get her back into the bar. But what does that actually look like? Do I leave a severely intoxicated woman alone in my car while I go inside? Do I try to persuade her to get back out? What if she refuses? What if the bartender refuses to take responsibility for her? What if it turns into an argument and somebody complains to Uber?
Even if it all goes smoothly, I may have lost 10 or 20 minutes and earned nothing.
The second option was to treat it as an emergency and call 911 or ask for police or medical assistance. That may be the safest choice in some circumstances, but that can also mean sitting there for an unknown amount of time, explaining the situation, dealing with a confused or combative passenger, and losing however much of the night it takes.
I chose the third option. I took her home.
It was only about five minutes away. She was still communicating with me. At that moment, it seemed like the lowest-conflict option. But ironically, it also became the option that placed the most responsibility on me.
During those few minutes, she became less coherent. I heard her head hit the window as we drove. I handed her one of the medical-grade vomit bags I keep in the car and told her to be ready to use it. By the time we reached her house, she was in bad shape.
She told me not to pull into the driveway because she did not want to wake her father. The driveway was icy, and she could not even open the car door by herself. I got out, walked around, and opened it for her.
She stepped out and fell.
She got back up, started toward the house, and fell again. Then again.
At that point, my job did not feel like it ended because the GPS said I had arrived. It was winter in Upstate New York. She could barely stand. I was not comfortable driving away and leaving her there.
So I stayed.
Eventually the front door opened. She made it inside. Only then did I leave.
I am not telling that story because I think I am a hero. I am telling it because I have been in that moment when an ordinary ride suddenly becomes something much more serious.
And not every situation is dramatic.
Just this past weekend, I picked up an older woman from the emergency room. She was medically fine. She was a lovely woman, but she was emotional, and the person who had ordered the ride for her was in Texas. When we got to her apartment, nobody was there to let her inside.
So I waited with her on the porch.
Five or ten minutes. Nothing heroic. Nothing extraordinary. But in the Uber app, that looked like a completed trip.
To me, it was more than that. I was not comfortable leaving an older woman outside a locked building and driving away without knowing whether somebody was actually coming to help her.
That is one of the things people miss about this job.
Some of the most important decisions an Uber driver makes may be decisions the algorithm never sees.
Uber can measure when I arrived. It can measure how long the trip took. It can measure where I dropped somebody off. It can record a rating.
But it does not necessarily see the moment when a driver decides to stay five extra minutes because a passenger is vulnerable. It does not see the judgment involved in deciding whether somebody needs an ambulance, whether a shoulder is safe, whether a passenger can physically make it inside, or whether a drunk person is capable of being left alone.
And when one of those situations goes badly, the consequences can be enormous.
That is where the independent-contractor debate becomes much less interesting to me. The legal classification may matter in court, but when somebody is barely conscious in the back seat of my car, nobody is thinking about whether I am a W-2 employee or a 1099 contractor.
There is a human being in my car, there is a problem, and I am the person physically there who has to decide what to do.
There is also a strange contradiction in the way we talk about drunk passengers.
We want people to take Uber instead of driving after drinking. That is obviously safer for everyone on the road. But if we are going to encourage people to use rideshare when they are intoxicated, we also have to acknowledge what that sometimes asks of the driver.
A passenger can get sick. They can lose consciousness. They can become combative. They can damage the car. A five-minute ride can suddenly turn into an hour-long problem.
Saying, “You signed up for it,” is too simple.
I signed up to transport people from one place to another. I did not knowingly sign up for every possible medical, behavioral, or safety crisis that might happen inside my vehicle.
The cleaning-fee discussion is part of that too.
If somebody vomits in a car late on a Friday night, the driver may be finished for the evening. The driver may lose the income they expected to make. The car may need professional cleaning the next day. Plans change. Time is lost.
A cleaning payment may help cover the cleaning. It does not necessarily cover what the incident actually cost the driver.
I once had a passenger unknowingly track dog poop into my car. Nobody did anything wrong. But it still meant stopping late at night, finding water and cleaning supplies, pulling out the mat, cleaning it, and losing 15 or 20 minutes of my working night.
That is obviously nowhere near the seriousness of what happened to Emily. The point is that drivers are often left to solve these strange, messy situations on their own.
And that brings me back to the part of this job that can feel very lonely.
When something goes wrong, “independent contractor” can suddenly feel very literal.
You are the person in the car. You make the judgment. You absorb the stress. You decide whether to call 911. You decide whether it is safe to stop. You decide whether to leave the passenger alone.
And if you handle the situation badly, everybody may hear about it.
If you handle it perfectly, nobody may ever know.
That seems like a missed opportunity.
I think Uber can do more than create training videos. Training matters, but this isn't just a knowledge problem. It is a decision-making-under-stress problem.
Drivers need to understand how quickly an ordinary ride can change. They need to know what signs might indicate a medical emergency. They need clearer guidance on when to call for help and how to handle a severely intoxicated passenger.
But drivers also need support when doing the right thing costs them time and money.
If a driver spends 45 minutes waiting with a vulnerable passenger because that is the safest thing to do, that should matter. If a driver properly handles a serious bodily-fluid incident, that should matter. If a driver makes an excellent judgment call under pressure, somebody should notice.
Uber celebrates drivers occasionally. I recently watched CEO Dara Khosrowshahi hand out awards at an Uber event in Miami.
They could go further.
Tell real stories about drivers who handled difficult situations well. Show other drivers what good judgment looks like. Celebrate the people who do more than complete the trip.
Because being a great Uber driver is not only about having a clean car, a high rating, or a smooth ride.
Sometimes it is about what you do when the ride goes wrong.
And that brings me back to Emily.
Someone getting sick in that car should have meant a terrible evening.
A dirty car.
A cleaning bill.
Lost income.
Maybe an ambulance.
Maybe everybody getting home hours later than expected.
It should not have ended with Emily’s death.
She should have gone home.
I still believe leaving them on the side of that highway was the wrong decision. Nothing I have written here is meant to excuse it.
But if all we do is condemn one terrible decision, we have not learned everything there is to learn from what happened.
Drivers should be trained. Drivers should be supported. Drivers should be held accountable when they make bad decisions. And drivers who make good decisions in difficult moments should be recognized too.
Because sometimes a $5 Uber ride stops being a $5 Uber ride.
Sometimes it becomes one human being helping another human being get home safely.
