WEEKEND EDITION- Uber’s Possible Drug Mule Problem, The Deadliest Road in America

This is a compilation of some of the most compelling stories of the week.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Welcome to the Daily Dive Weekend edition. I'm Oscar Ramirez,
and every week I explore the top stories making waves
in the news and some that are just playing interesting.
I'll connect you with the journalists and the people who
know the story and bring you news without the noise
so you can make an informed decision. You can catch
a new episode of The Daily Dive every Monday through Friday,
and it's ready when you wake up. On the weekend edition,

(00:27):
I'll be bringing you some of the best stories from
the week. Uber has a courier service called Uber Connect,
where you can have a package picked up at one
location and delivered to another. Drivers don't know what's inside
the package, but some suspect they may be being used
to transport drugs and other prohibited items. Drivers can cancel deliveries,

(00:47):
but some feel compelled to go through with suspicious deliveries
for safety concerns since the customers often have their first name, photo,
license plate, and vehicle description. For more on how some
of these drivers fear they may be being used as
unwitting drug mules, will speak to David Ingram, tech reporter
at NBC News. What I heard speaking to drivers for

(01:07):
Uber is really they're concerned about their safety. So oftentimes
they'll drive for multiple apps or multiple services. They'll do
passenger rides. And then there are also those who do
what's known as Uber connects, and they will get what
they considered to be suspicious requests. So I spoke with
one person who was driving for Uber Connect in Arizona.

(01:28):
They said they got a request from a customer in
order to deliver a package from one motel to another
motel at one am. They thought that was suspicious. Yeah, yeah,
one and one and two really, and they dropped off
the package. It didn't seem like there was much in it,
and they dropped it off to somebody who appeared really nervous,

(01:49):
and they decided, you know, based on that and some
other factors, they decided to stop driving, first for Uber
Connect and then for Uber all together. So these drivers
all have kind of wild stories about the minds of
things are being asked to deliver at the times of day,
you know. One person said that they had a DVD,
a single DVD case they were asked to deliver, and
it was an a Nicolas Cage film and when the

(02:11):
driver shook the case, it seemed to have something in it.
Other than a DVD. So Uber rules prevent them from
tampering or opening packages, but clearly their suspicions are heightened.
And in the first example that you were talking about
in Arizona, so it was just a plastic bag that
they were delivering with a pen, some candy in a

(02:31):
box about the size of two decks of cars that
was covered in an excessive amount of tape. So, I mean,
these are those tell tale signs of it could be
something pretty bad in there. And as you mentioned, Uber
says you shouldn't be opening the packages or tampering with
the packages. It reminds me of the Transporter movies with
Jason Statham, where you know, one of the rules is
never opened the package. You're not supposed to do that.

(02:51):
But for a lot of these drivers that curiosity takes over.
You get that sense of like, man, there could be
something not right in there, and sometimes they try to
sometimes they don't. You know, I know a lot of
them follow the rules, but we also know that some don't. Yeah.
I spoke to one driver in Miami who said that,
you know, look, the curiosity just writes her and she
wants to know what's in the package. And so she

(03:11):
said she had found cannabis as well as adderall and
you know, she knew she was breaking sort of Ruber policy,
but the phrase that she used was that she thought
she was basically being used as a as a drug mule,
which is common phrase and for a drug trafficker who's
sort of coerced into doing that, And she just wanted
to know, like, if if I'm muling, what am I

(03:32):
going to be muling for? And you know, these drivers
say that they're not paid enough to be hanging around
drugs and taking on that risk, whether it's a risk
of arrests, whether it's a safety issue, and they feel
coerced into making these deliveries because you know, they could
go to the police but then and some have done that,
of course, but they also say that they're fearful of

(03:55):
doing so because by the time they pick up the
package and know that it's suspicious from their standpoint, the
customer who's handing them the package already has their first name,
at least, the making model of their car, the license
plate number, you know, other factors that are given to
Uber customers. So it works just like the regular passenger apps.

(04:17):
So yeah, they give you a lot of information, identifying
information to connect with the right person, and yeah, they
have that. You can track how the delivery is being made. Also,
you know, if you go to the Uber connect website,
that's one of the big selling points that you can
track in real time how your package is getting there.
So these people, you know, if they're sending using the
service for nefarious needs, right, they know when you're going

(04:38):
off track. So yeah, they're the big safety concern for
those drivers, and a financial concern to write because some
of the drivers were saying, you know, if you keep
canceling deliveries or you know, you get there, you cancel
whatever it may be, that you can be penalized and
you can be dropped from the app, all all that stuff.
So there's a lot of different concerns floating around, that's right. Yeah.
So now, Uber of course is not the first package

(05:00):
delivery service to face this issue. This has been around
as long as any package delivery service really, I mean
UPS and FedEx have dealt with similar issues. US Postal
Service continues to deal with these issues all the time,
and so in a sense, upers just joining a club here.
But the drivers also said that they would like to
like Uper to to take steps to ensure their safety.

(05:21):
So drivers of course go through background checks. They would
like maybe customers who use the service to go through
background checks, or maybe delimit it to businesses sending packages
to customers or to other businesses. So as it stands,
the service, you know, anybody can use it to send
a packages to anybody else. So, uh, there's not a

(05:41):
lot of I mean, there are some safeguards. So I
spoke with Uper, people from Uber and you know, their
corporate headquarters says that look, we you know, we require
the customers to check a box on the app that
they understand what the rules are. They understand that they're
going to not send prohibited items. There's a list bread
the items. They have teens at Uber who are former

(06:03):
law enforcement people who can look into these reports. Uber
says they've gotten six requests from law enforcement to help
to look into potential drugs on the surface. But the
drivers the fence book, you said that these precautions that
company takes aren't enough for them. Yeah, I mean it
seems like as far as from the reporting right and
what Uber was saying, you know, if somebody is caught

(06:25):
in violation of this stuff, really the worst that happens
is they get removed from the app. You can't really
use it much more anymore. I mean, if they take
it through a law enforcement and something progresses that way,
that's a different thing. But for Uber, they'll just kick
you off the app. So I mean, that's that's a
tough one there to swallow. And then some of the
drivers have also said that they feel the support system
for reporting suspicious stuff doesn't really live up to it um.

(06:50):
You know, one guy in particular said he was transferred
twenty seven times when he was trying to flag something,
and you know, people on the other side of things
just didn't know what to do, like they didn't know
how to approach the situation. They didn't. It's it's but
the people who are answering the phones for support for Uber,
you know, they're not the highest paid employees at Uber,

(07:11):
of course, and Uber has acknowledged that, in fact that
that in some instances, the people who work on their
support teams have fallen down, have not met the expectations
of the company to help drivers through these kind of
sticky situations. You know, these are complicated situations, asking someone
who thinks they're in possession of drugs, should they go
to law enforcement to think about their own safety, and

(07:35):
you know, law enforcement may or may not be interested.
I did hear from a driver who said that that
they were turned away by law enforcement because this is
with the customer with the driver considered to be suspicious
didn't meet their level of being able to open the package.
So there's there's that fear too. You know what if
no one listens, you know what if what if law
enforcement um decides to charge the driver? That may be unlikely,

(07:58):
but uh, driver are afraid of that as well. Yeah,
the liability question is huge, and for Uber, it seems
like the liability for them is pretty low, right, I
mean they're just connecting clients to a driver, right, That's
kind of what they were talking about when they were
the whole discussion around our driver's employees or they just
independent contractors. Right, They're saying, we're just the platform connecting people.

(08:21):
So the liability for Uber the platform could be pretty low.
But for the driver, right, they can be mistaken as
being part of a situation like that and they can
still be charged and you know they might have legal bills, um.
You know, they have all kinds of conserations there that
that they don't want to be a part of. Uh.
There's an interesting sort of phrase that that comes up

(08:42):
in this context, which is the wilful blindness. You know,
even if the driver or uber doesn't know directly that
what's in the package is drugs, if they are willfully
blind the idea that the service is being used this
way repeatedly, then um. You know, legal experts I spoke
with said that that the company in particular could could

(09:03):
be liable in that case. The government may require Uber,
demand that Uber take extra steps tipper event um, the
service being used this way, that's to be determined. That
I did speak with someone from the Drug Enforcement Administration,
the federal agency that that would handle something like this,
and they're not saying anything at the moment. They declined

(09:24):
to comment, but they're certainly awhere of of our reporting
and um, and they have looked at similar cases in
the past involving FedEx and and EPs. So we'll see
what comes to that. David Ingram, Czech reporter at NBC News,
thank you very much for joining us, happy to do so. Finally,

(09:46):
this week, we'll tell you about the deadliest road in
America US nineteen A stretch of highway in Pasco County, Florida.
The road has three lanes on both sides with extra
turn lanes and a speed limit of forty five to
fifty five, making it more a freeway. The road was
definitely not built with pedestrians in mind, as crosswalks are
few and far between, causing people to often cross wherever

(10:07):
they can to access businesses and restaurants along the way.
Roads like this are called strodes, meant to be quick
thoroughfares to the multiple cities, but also share characteristics with
smaller streets places for people to live, shop and eat,
and this combination can be deadly for those on foot.
For more and what to know, speak to Marin Cogan,
senior correspondent at vox Us. Nine Team is a highway

(10:31):
that runs from Erie, Pennsylvania, all the way down to
about Clearwater, Florida. So it's very long highway, and in
Florida in particular, there's this one stretch of it at
Pasco County just north of Tampa, sort of a suburb
of Tampa, where it's just an incredibly dangerous road for pedestrians.
The reason I got interested in the story as I

(10:51):
was looking at a study by a handful of researchers
who took all of the government's traffic fatality statistics from
two thousand and one to two thousand sixteen, and they
tried to identify hot spots. So these hot spots for
a thousand meters stretches where six or more people had
been killed over to eight year periods. And what they
found is of sixty pedestrian fatality hot spots in the country,

(11:14):
seven of them were on this single stretch of road
in Pasco County, Florida. So it is an incredibly dangerous road.
But as you mentioned, there are roads like this all
across the country. I mean it's places as diversist New
York and Albuquerque and Georgia and Los Angeles, It's it's
all over the country. So this is a national problem

(11:35):
and it's really reflected it by the fact that pedestrian
fatalities are on the rise in this country and have
been on the rise since the start of the pandemic.
And the numbers that you looked out there were from
two thousand one to you look at other numbers to
just to see if this trend had kept going in
and one we also saw increased debts I don't know
if that was particularly on this road specifically, but just overall,

(11:58):
we were seeing a lot of pedestri in deaths. That's
exactly right. So the answer is yes to both of those.
So we looked specifically at the data for this particular
stretch of road in Pasco County because we wanted to see,
as they said, the data only went to sixteen. We
wanted to see what happened between sixteen and now, and
we found that on this stretch of road at least
forty eight people have been killed in crashes involving pedestrians

(12:21):
since and then the numbers are also on the rise
all across the country. So pedestrian fatalities have been on
the rise in this country for the past ten years,
but they really spiked starting in the sixty seven. Hundred
pedestrians were killed that year and then in pedestrians were
killed by drivers across the US and that is the

(12:42):
most pedestrians killed in forty years in this country. So
it's a big wide road. I think there might be
eight or nine lanes across both sides of it. You know,
there's a bunch of businesses lining up the all the
sides of the street. So you know, as people are
walking by, hey, I want to go onto that street.
Sometimes people run across without going to the crosswalk because

(13:05):
since it's such a long stretch of road, you know,
you can go maybe about half a mile before you
hit a crosswalk, and if you need to get to
that restaurant or whatever it might be over there, you're
gonna cut over right now. So describe a little more
to us about what this road in particular looks like.
So this road, it's something that people who are really
interested in traffic engineering and planning call a stroad. So

(13:25):
a stroade is something that's trying to be a road
in a street at the same time. A street you
can think of as like a place where people shop
and live and recreates, and you want ideally traffic to
be slow in that space because there's going to be
a lot of pedestrians and a lot of businesses, and
you want people to be able to safely move around
without facing high speed cars. A road is meant to
get cars quickly through through a place from one point

(13:48):
to another. So a stroade is sort of trying to
do both and is the worst of both worlds. So
what you have is a lot of cars moving very quickly,
multiple lands of traffic, really open road that encourages drivers
to go very fast, and then you have lots of
people walking around as well. So as a part of
my reporting, I both drove this road and I walked
the road, and I will say it's a very different

(14:09):
experience to drive then to walk it. You know, when
you're walking it, you really feel the extent to which
this road was not designed for you to be walking
on it, And when you're driving it you almost feel like,
you know, it's hard not to go fast because it's
so big and wide open and the sort of queues
that's giving you as a driver, or like this is
open and this is for me to just go as
quickly as possible. So there are roads like this all

(14:31):
across the US. I would definitely encourage people to look
for these in their own community, places where there's a
lot of commercial development, people walking, and also multiple lanes
and lots of traffic and people turning. Anytime you have
a road like this, you're creating exponential opportunities for drivers
to come into conflict with either other drivers or with

(14:51):
pedestrians or cyclists. We're talking about US nineteen, right, there
in Pasco County in Florida. The speed limit is that's
already pretty fast when you're when you want to figure
in pedestrians. But like you, just like you said, right,
we know people drive so much faster, So I mean,
I'm sure they're hitting sixty maybe even seventy in some
stretches where they might not see a lot of congestion.

(15:13):
That's absolutely right. And another big part of the story,
which I touch on in the piece, is that SUVs
and trucks have increased the percentage of them that are
on the road over the last ten twenty years, So
there are more people driving SUVs and trucks, and the
SUVs and trucks have gotten much bigger. There's a concept
called truck bloat, which kind of refers to, you know,
the trucks you see that are bigger and bigger and bigger,

(15:34):
and people, you know, buy those for all sorts of reasons.
It's very safe for the drivers, it might be very comfortable,
might be easy for them to get around, but the
unfortunate fact of the matter is those types of vehicles
are much more deadly to pedestrians than smaller sedans. And uh,
you know, economy and compact cars. So you have these
much bigger vehicles on the road, and they're on these

(15:55):
roads that are sort of encouraging them to go faster.
If there are a lot of pedestrians around, it's sort
of free. It's a perfect storm of danger for the pedestrians.
You mentioned that you both drove and walked this stretch
of road. Over about a fifteen mile stretch, you came
across twelve or more signs commemorating people that have died there,
people that were in incidents where pedestrians got killed. I

(16:17):
mean that's almost every mile that you would see a
little memorial there. And you did get a chance to
speak to some people who had lost loved ones. Tell
me a little bit about that. I did speak with
several people who had lost loved ones. You know, the
primary one in my story as a woman named Julie,
whose brother Kevin was killed walking the road last year.
And you know, her experience was symbolic of the experience

(16:39):
of what many other people faced, which is feeling like
this thing that happened this this depth of their loved
ones didn't need to happen. It didn't need to happen
this way. It's it's the results of designs that are
dangerous and then people being reckless and and not wanting
to face face the consequences of their own recklessness. So
her family was really devastated by it. She told me

(17:00):
how it was really hard for the family to gather
after they lost her brother, and her mom would even um.
I thought this would really was really sweet. He was
her brother was cremated, and her mom would bring his remains,
you know, with her to family events because she couldn't
bear to not have him there. I was really moved
by that story and just the way that this affects
so many people's lives. I know, there's always kind of

(17:22):
things in the work to add, you know, more stop
signs and better lighting and everything. But what do you
do once these some of these roads have already been
set out there and like you mentioned, just aren't designed
for pedestrian traffic at all. Yeah, that's a really great question.
So there is a there is a growing sort of
body of criticism of the way that our roads are
designed by engineers and planners, and there's this growing sense

(17:45):
that we need to design roads that take people into
account who exists outside of the car, So people who
are not just drivers. There are lots of people who
can't drive for one reason or another, who maybe walking
or riding a bike, and we need to make sure
that the roads are stay for them too, and that
you know, the design doesn't reflect this idea that the
road is only for vehicles and it's for them to

(18:06):
go as fast and as quickly as possible. So some
of those ideas. There are ways to calm traffic down.
There are ways to make cars go slower. We could
narrow roads, we could introduce certain road features that will
help slow people down. There are speed governors that could
be used in cars to help slow people down. And

(18:26):
then there's also you know, questions of infrastructure. What can
we add to create safe spaces for pedestrians and cyclists.
All of those things I think would be tremendously helpful.
But the approach we have now is basically like, well,
let's just add on another lane and see what happens.
Let's just add this one thing and see what happens.
That's not really a radical enough approach to change anything.

(18:47):
And I think you know what you often end up
having are these sort of Frankenstein roads where they just
keep adding and adding and adding and adding it doesn't
actually solve the problem. It just makes the road bigger
and in some cases even makes the problem worse. So,
I mean, the good news about this is that there
are actually a lot of things that can be done.
It's finding the political will to change it and to say,

(19:09):
you know, this isn't normal. Our pedestrian fatality rates are
higher than in other comparable countries. We need to change this,
and we need to prioritize it. And once we start
doing that as a people, I think, you know, there's
a lot of opportunity to make our road safer. Marin Cogan,
Senior correspondent at Vox, thank you very much for joining us.
Thanks so much for having me. That's it for this weekend.

(19:30):
Be sure to check out The Daily Dive every Monday
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This episode of The Daily Dive has been engineered by

(19:51):
Tony Sargentina. I'm Oscar Ramirez in Los Angeles and this
was your daily dive weekend edition Fash