Filthy Ride Share Vehicles
SURVEY SAYS: RIDE SHARE VEHICLES ARE FILTHY!
A friendly operator in San Francisco reached out to me yesterday to chat about what he is already hearing from his business clients. The message is coming in loud and clear: travelers want reassurance that vehicles are bug free! Clean is definitely the NEW safe. I wrote an opinion piece to the GCLA membership a few weeks ago with that very title. Now, my friends, it’s coming to light just how important cleaning protocols will be for all segments of our lives—the entertainment, travel and mobility industries, even more so.
There is always a silver lining. Ours is in a golden opportunity to win back lost business traveler work to Uber, Lyft and the ride-hail business by marketing our industry as one that is not only safe but certifiably so. We are the sector of ground transportation that is BEST equipped to control our vehicle environments and he/she who can sell that assurance, wins. With the help of the global sanitation industry who is certifying hotels, airports, event centers and more, we are working in overdrive to get the first transportation sanitation program managed by a scientific third party and we are almost there—in fact we even have a name for this program. Getting to this place was no small undertaking. If all stays on track, we will have a roll out transportation certification for the industry within two weeks. We are confident this will appease the California government, and way beyond to our national and international administrations.
How great is our timing? Well, pretty darn spot on. Recently Netquote.com, an online insurance aggregator, published a Driving for Germs study. The article was written by Jacob Geanous of the BBC. Here is his report posted Monday, May 18th:
Insurance aggregator Netquote took swabs of the most commonly touched areas in ride-sharing vehicles such as doors handles, seat belts, and window buttons. They also swabbed the same spots in taxis and rental cars to determine which was dirtier for their ‘Driving with Germs’ study.
The study found that ride-sharing cars had an average of six million ‘colony-forming units’ (CFUs) of bacteria per square inch on those surfaces. Rental cars were found to have approximately 2 million CFUs and cabs averaged just 27,593 CFUs.
For some perspective, there are 171 CFUs on an average square inch of a toilet seat. A toothbrush holder can carry up to two million CFUs and a coffee maker carries an average of 32,000 CFUs.
I am giddy with hope for your businesses. I pray that beyond all this tragedy is a rebound for your businesses that will be exceptional. We are definitely moving in the right direction so stay tuned for more specifics to follow.
Sara Eastwood-Richardson
