When I imagine getting out of a moving car, it’s just like in the movies – quick, controlled, smooth. In reality? It was nothing like that.
The first thing I felt was a sharp shock. Quick? Yes. Controlled? Not at all. The initial impact was straight on to my knees. There was dragging, friction, belongings strewn; the sound of a vase I had in my bag smashing into the ground – a thoughtful gift that was shattered so my knees didn’t have to be.
I jumped without thinking. It was like I was in a trance. I didn’t think about a single repercussion. Not about how fast the car was going, whether the door was unlocked, hurting myself, hitting my head, what I would do next. I just knew I had to get out. I clicked out of my seatbelt, opened the door and let myself fall into the tarmac. Getting in a taxi was supposed to be the safe decision. It was 10pm on a night in late January. I didn’t want to sit there by myself in the almost-empty train station, I just wanted to get home. So I booked myself a cab.
I heard the car before I saw it. The sound of sports commentary was blaring from the windows, cigarette smoke leaking out. Something felt off, and perhaps at this point I should have just walked away. But I did what I’ve been told to do: I checked the registration number and the car model and it all matched, so I climbed into the back seat.
‘Hi,’ the driver said, looking back at me intensely as I sat down, and drew his cigarette to his lips. He didn’t start driving straight away, either – he just looked at me. Many women have experienced the stream of questions that followed: where I was going, where I’d been, if I had a boyfriend. He asked if I’d had a good time, if I had been drinking. I hadn’t – not that it matters. It was all unsettling, but with one question – ‘I’m taking a shortcut, do you know it?’ – I felt in danger. I had already shared the map with my husband (as I had every other time I’d used Uber), so both he and I could see the car go off route, but I sent him a panicked text anyway. As the car seemed to slow slightly, pulling into a housing estate, thoughts rushed through my mind: did the driver live here? Was he going to stop the car? Had he always known, maybe even before I got in the car, that he wouldn’t be following my route? I didn’t want to find out the answers to any of those questions. My body screamed at me: get out of the car, get out now. So I did. And I ran, I shook and I cried, until my friend and husband came to get me. My creepy, smoking, football-blasting driver supposedly had a 4.96 star rating… how?
The reality of the safe way home
‘Yeah. You all right, sweets? I’ll be waiting for you when you get here,’ the gruff voice plays out over my phone’s loudspeakers. The video’s caption, to which the gym bro on screen silently points, reads: ‘Play this if you’re in a cab/Uber and you feel unsafe.’ It’s been saved by over 90,000 people at time of writing. There are hundreds of these videos across TikTok and Instagram mimicking a telephone conversation with a partner or brother, and they highlight something very real: we don’t feel safe in taxis. Seventy one per cent of you said you have felt unsafe in a taxi or private hire vehicle, in a recent Cosmopolitan UK poll*. But before we go any further, let’s not ignore the fact that taxis are a luxury. In 2021, the charity End Violence Against Women reported that one in two women felt unsafe walking alone after dark in a busy public place, compared to one in five men. Those statistics are, unsurprisingly, even starker when it comes to walking in a quiet street, or in a park or other open space. Even worse, two out of three women aged 16 to 34 had experienced a form of harassment in the previous 12 months, and 29% had felt like they were being followed. Another survey, commissioned by British Transport Police in 2024, found that violence against women and girls on British railways had risen by more than 50% over two years. Similarly worrying statistics have also been seen on many bus networks across the country, albeit monitoring is sparser.
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For those of us able to afford them, taxis can feel the safest solution. Yes, some of you might remember the public awareness campaigns of the 2000s and 2010s, warning of the dangers of getting into unbooked and unlicensed minicabs. But the new wave of private taxi apps seemed to mark a change in that. If you’re faced with choosing between a walk home alone in the dark or a late-night bus, the promise of a licensed taxi with vetted drivers and shareable tracking feels like a no-brainer. So why, when I began to share my experience, did I find myself inundated with similar stories? Transport for London (TfL) publishes annual data specifically recording the number of ‘Taxi and Private Hire Vehicle journey-related sexual offences’. It shows that an average of 175 cases of sexual offences specifically relating to taxis and private hire vehicles have been recorded each year since 2012. But that’s just in London, and only the cases that have been reported.
There’s no denying that Uber now dominates the UK taxi industry, particularly in larger cities. By 2024, the company boasted more than 100,000 drivers serving 5 million active riders across the UK, and growing. So, it’s perhaps not surprising that so many of the stories I heard personally, related to the platform and its drivers. Sealed court records (seen by the New York Times) showed that Uber received a report of sexual assault or sexual misconduct in the United States every eight minutes, on average, between 2017 and 2022 – that’s a total of 400,181 Uber trips. However, Uber – which publishes a safety report in the United States, to track its progress when it comes to improving safety on the platform – said that reports of serious sexual assault on its platform have, in fact, dropped by 44% from 2017 to 2022. It also said that the ‘approximately 400,000 are unaudited, so could include incorrect and mistakenly categorized reports, as well as false reports submitted with the goal of getting a refund’. Uber does have a range of safety features that include being able to call emergency services directly from the app and phone number anonymization (so any communication with your driver doesn’t show your personal number).
There’s 24/7 customer support, and each journey is tracked via GPS, which contributes to something called RideCheck which detects if a trip has had an unexpectedly long stop or your car has crashed. ‘Uber has changed how we travel and from foundational safety tools to industry-first features, we have built safety into every trip,’ a spokesperson told us. ‘This has empowered millions of women in the UK to get where they need to go safely, and we take that responsibility very seriously.’
The ones who got away
Jacquie McGeoch watched, from her taxi window, as her hotel passed her by. She’d been having dinner with her colleagues in Gateshead and ordered a cab to take her to the hotel she had stayed in multiple times. Her driver cruised straight past the hotel and, a few minutes down the road, pulled into an industrial estate. ‘I was screaming “take me to my hotel” over and over,’ Jacquie tells me. She said her driver had begun to pretend, at this point in the journey, that he couldn’t understand her Scottish accent and parked the car, turning off the engine. Jacquie told me how there were large buildings all around them – an experience not at all dissimilar to mine – but that she had concerns about getting out of the car ‘in case he had someone waiting’. I could understand this thought process – I, too, had wondered if my driver had other associates involved in whatever he was doing. While she was shouting, threatening and screaming at her driver to take her back to her hotel, Jacquie told me, she contacted a male colleague on the phone, which seemed to make a difference. After a few minutes of chaos, her driver agreed to take her back to her hotel. She rushed out and ran inside, grateful to be out of that car. But what if it had been her house, and he’d known where she lived?
The stories, since I started researching for this feature, have been non-stop. And, with each one, this is the fear that remains: ‘My driver knows where I live.’ We trust our drivers to get us home, but also with our most personal information. We catch cabs late at night, after parties and socialising. When it’s dark outside and we don’t want to be out on the streets alone. My driver was interested in whether or not I’d been drinking, where I was going and whether I had anyone waiting for me. Often, women are clambering into the back of cars while in their most vulnerable states. It goes without saying that we should be taken care of, not turned into a target.
The morning after her brother’s 21st, Abby‡ woke up with little memory of her journey home. She hadn’t wanted to carry on to the venue some of her friends were heading to, so got in the same car and planned to carry on home after dropping them off. But when she looked on her journey map, she could see that her driver had driven past her house, via a park and then on for around 20 minutes beyond her address, before circling back and taking her home. It was not possible to see if the car had stopped at all; this was before the introduction of Uber’s RideCheck, which would have alerted her to the long stop. She ‘freaked out’, she told me, because she’d been drunk, had possibly fallen asleep, and couldn’t remember anything about it. Abby says she remembers ‘being really panicked… what could he have done to me?’ She wondered if the detour had been to drive the fare up, but regardless of the motive the situation was scary, and Abby told me she’s had to accept that she’ll never know what happened. Either way, her driver saw an opportunity – whatever it was – and took it. Other stories that I’ve heard in the nine months since my own experience included that of Emma‡, who had her journey cancelled while she was in the car and was taken on a motorway. Megan, who had a driver lock the door on her and refuse to open it until she watched videos of his favourite conspiracy theories. Olivia‡, whose driver turned down a dark lane, and when she questioned why, asked her if she had been drinking. She hadn’t. He drove her home. Today, Olivia wonders, ‘What if my answers had been different?’ There are stories of drivers falling asleep at the wheel, drivers visibly drunk – and I’ve heard, so far, six accounts of endless pestering as to whether or not they had a boyfriend, and propositions for their passengers to come home with them.
This seems to be a regular occurrence. When we asked if you’d ever been sexually propositioned or asked out by your taxi or Uber driver, 41%* of you replied that you had. When we reached out to Uber about these examples, the company asked for further details so that it could fully investigate and look into each incident and added, ‘Ninety-nine point nine per cent of trips on Uber end without a safety incident, but we know that even one incident is one too many. This is why we continue to invest in industry- leading features and tools that prioritise women’s safety at every step of their journey. Sexual harassment has no place on Uber and we strongly encourage our riders to report any incidents to us so that we can investigate and take action.’
None of the women I spoke to reported what happened to them, many saying it ‘just didn’t feel big enough’ to warrant it, or that they wouldn’t be able to prove anything. They just gave a low star rating and tried to forget about it. It’s easy to look back and wish I had reported my driver – I got a notification from Uber asking if everything was okay, because my journey stopped earlier than expected. By this point I was extremely shaken up, and it seemed to me that by saying ‘no’ the only option was to call the police. I didn’t want to do that. What could they have done? All I had was a screenshot showing a car in a dead-end car park, and a desperate need to puke.
Later, Uber said that my account had been deactivated for putting my driver in danger. It was a kick in the teeth, and I responded as such. Uber told me it takes driver safety very seriously, and I therefore wouldn’t be allowed to use Uber again. When I wrote about my experience on a personal blog, I got in touch with Uber to say what happened, and the company apologised for inconvenience caused and offered to reinstate my account. Then, when I was researching this feature, Uber looked into my frightening journey further and said, ‘Unfortunately, a GPS issue meant the driver didn’t take the normal route for this journey. We’re very sorry for the distress that this caused.’ The experience has tainted my view of the app, and I won’t set foot in one of its cars again.
Uber has said that the instances experienced in its cars are symptomatic of a wider problem, and it’s true – we live in a deeply misogynistic society. A study published by UN Women UK in partnership with YouGov found that 71% of women had been subject to sexual harassment in public places, and Uber’s safety reports clearly show an awareness of this issue. There’s also the grim reality that the majority of violence against women happens when they get home, at the hands of a partner or someone who they know. Uber works with domestic abuse charities, to use the company’s visibility to promote awareness. In the United States, it’s trialling it so that you can request a woman driver, but with 93% of all taxi and private hire vehicle drivers in the UK being male (2024, and higher than 90% for the last ten years, according to government data), it just doesn’t seem feasible.
Out of those who had either felt unsafe or been propositioned, 91%* of you did not report it. This is, often, what we do as women; we try to shrug things off, and we’ve normalised, to some degree, these daily instances where we feel unsafe and scared. I followed my instincts and got out, but what if I hadn’t? What if Jacquie hadn’t ‘screamed like a banshee’ and called her colleague? What if Olivia had chosen to drink that night?
For many women who choose cabs as their route home, it seems we’ve come to expect a certain level of intrusion – even in journeys we wouldn’t deem unsafe. What of those moments where we may just be zoning out, tired and wanting to get home, as our drivers ask us about our relationship status and we thoughtlessly reply ‘yes’ or ‘no’? A common theme from all the stories I’ve been told this year is lying to drivers, whether it be about saying the address we are going to is not our own, who we are dating, or whether we agree with the driver’s political rants. This shows that we feel our answers, and our true selves, make us vulnerable. That we have to be on guard, at all times. We wouldn’t think to report these things, as they’re so part and parcel of our journeys home, yet maybe we should. When it comes to Uber, it told us that it has community guidelines that all drivers must follow, which include not being allowed to ask personal questions – such as querying a rider’s relationship status. All drivers also have access to optional training to advise them on scenarios that could occur on the trip, and the trainings were built in partnership with The Survivors Trust and GMB union. Uber also works with Crisis Prevention Institute, Barnardo’s and the AA to develop and deliver this bespoke training and ensure that their processes, policies and products represent best practice across areas including sexual misconduct and safeguarding. Yet, it seems many drivers pay no attention to these rules and, without being reported, face no repercussions for that being the case.
What would the statistics look like if we all reported every time a taxi driver behaved inappropriately towards us? What changes would Uber and similar companies make as a result? How many people need to get out of a moving car? I shared my story in the hope it would bring attention to the reality of the safe way home – and I’ll leave you with this: which way home is that?
Hannah Fox is Good Housekeeping UK’s Ecommerce Editor, testing and reviewing products across homes, gardening, fashion and travel, and reporting on the best deals during sales events including Amazon Prime Day and Black Friday.
Since 2014, Hannah has written homes, wellness, women’s health and lifestyle content for numerous UK titles including Country Living, House Beautiful, Cosmopolitan and Harper's Bazaar, and published a book in 2019.
Before becoming a journalist, Hannah worked in SEO for five years, writing optimised content and conducting technical audits. She also spoke on the main stage at BrightonSEO in 2021.
Outside of work, you can find Hannah listening to podcasts, reading, or enjoying all the delicious food and alcohol-free cocktails London has to offer! You can follow Hannah on Instagram at @hannahefoxy.
