Arbitrator orders Uber to pay $40 million over passenger's death after driver forced women out at freeway gore point

A rider told Uber that Vu Tran had given him "the least safe" ride he had experienced ^[10]. According to the release from Panish, Shea, Ravipudi, the firm that represented Emily Normandin-Parker's parents, the company received multiple complaints about Tran's "reckless behavior" ^[10], told customers it was reviewing his account, and then, on the evidence presented at the arbitration, did not review his incidents ^[11].

Tran had completed nearly 6,000 trips at a 4.96 rating and, per the release, had no previous incidents involving unsafe freeway stops or rider injury ^[9]. Riders write a sentence into a support form and get on with their week. In my view teams lean on the rating because it is the number already on the dashboard, and the sentence sits in another system with another owner.

Spread the award across his trip history and each ride carries about $6,700 in hindsight, which is 40,000,000 divided by 6,000 ^[21].

The dispute that night was about a cleaning fee, and there were two ways to collect one. Tran demanded payment at the roadside and ordered the women out of the car, according to the release ^[4]. After the crash he drove near Normandin-Parker's body, took the next exit, did not render aid or call 911, and called Uber to seek a cleaning fee ^[6]. Stone wrote that Tran stopped at an "unsafe and illegal" gore point when he could have used the MacArthur Boulevard exit ramp and stopped at a safe place instead ^[7]. "Tran showed far more worry for his new car than he did for his passengers," Stone wrote in the arbitration ^[8].

Uber disputes the result. "While we respect the arbitration process, we believe the arbitrator was wrong in holding Uber legally responsible for the tragic events of that night," a company spokesperson said ^[15]. Uber also said Tran is no longer a driver with the company ^[16]. The reasoning available publicly comes from the plaintiffs' release and the passages of the award quoted in it.

Ken Parker told the Los Angeles Times: "It's important that the judge did what he did because there have been additional deaths since Emily, and unless Uber changes the way it does business, there will be more" ^[18].

The workable test for a marketplace is a two-column list. On the left, every safety sentence the support tooling is allowed to send a customer. On the right, the artifact that would show the sentence was true: a case ID, a named reviewer, a timestamp, a decision. Rows with an empty right-hand column are the kind that turned up in this award. Normandin-Parker died in August 2023, and the award came about three years later ^[22].