Back Attack: Are Uber Drivers Who Jerk You Around Also Chiropractor Subsidizers?

by Alex Lightman

This week I learned several new things as a result of a jerky Uber ride and rubbing my neck. 

A week ago it rained heavily where I live in Santa Monica. Normally I like to walk, but it was cold and pouring buckets, so I caught an Uber pool from the Starbucks at the corner of Pico and Lincoln (where everyone was drenched, and smelled a bit like dogs right after they are forced to take a bath) to Barnes & Noble about two miles away. The driver was pleasant, but had fallen behind, and was trying to make up for lost time by accelerating fast, cornering hard, and slamming on the brakes whenever a car would cut in or stop in front of us. 

Perhaps she wasn’t used to driving in the rain, but during the ride, all the back and forth started to make my lower back (lumbar) then my neck feel sore. I found myself rubbing my neck during the ride, and through this past week, which was full of meetings. And because I don’t usually rub my neck, my friends and work colleagues noticed, and asked me what was going on. 

In the conversations that followed, I was shocked to find that six of the people I talk regularly with had similar experiences of being in a jerky Uber or Lyft (what I and other call car-as- a-service) and then having a sore neck or back (or both) afterwards. This seemed like a much more common problem than I had realized.

One of these people was Dr. Martin Flynn. He was in Las Vegas using Uber and being driven in a Tesla. The jerking he experienced in traffic was intense. “There was no feathering”, he said, no soft touch to gently accelerate and glide to a stop. It was all lurching. 

I admit that for a few hours I wondered whether chiropractors, who get paid to adjust the spines and necks of people in pain, were secretly donating to Uber drivers to get them to create potential customers. I almost expected to hear that after jerky rides the driver would hand out a chiropractor’s business card. 

As an engineer, I can’t help but break down problems and try to find fixes or solutions. One way I do this is with a four-step medical style framework.

Observation: Vibrations, sharp turns, braking, can hurt a passenger’s back. If the driver is inexperienced, this can be worse. If the driver is in Uber pool or has the extra pressure of having to pick up multiple people with time pressures and the confusion of finding people who aren’t always where the map says they are, they can get distracted and do even more damage.

Diagnosis: Inexperienced drivers are going to create small injuries and pain that is going to hurt productivity, and possibly cause people not to use Uber or other car- as-a- service options.

Prognosis: As more people become car-as- a-service drivers for Uber and Lyft, supply increases with new drivers, and the average “years of experience” falls.

Demand increases as more cars become available, exposing more people to driving that is more jerky than their own. Back and neck problems are likely going to increase. 

Prescription: Mandate that all Uber, Lyft, and car-as- a-service providers install intelligent tracking devices, like those from Cartrack.com, which provide accurate records of not only where the car has been and is going, but also has the precision to record the jerks, and harsh cornering, braking, and acceleration. 

What does something like this cost? The cost is under $20 per month per car, or roughly the cost of a cup of coffee, for a week of monitoring. If a driver is taking 50 passengers a day, this comes to pennies per trip, to get alerts that will let the driver and the passenger have indisputable objective information about how smooth or jerky that a given driver is driving. 

Back pain is serious: it’s the no. 1 cause of disability world-wide, and the no. 2 reason that people in the US go to visit the doctor (after respiratory infections). At any given moment (like right this moment as you read these words), 31 million Americans are suffering from back pain. During the year, about half of all Americans (half of our population of 330 million is 165 million) suffer from back pain. The annual cost of dealing with back pain is over $50 billion a year, in the US alone, and probably hundreds of billions globally. 

There are over 1.1 billion vehicles, but only a few million of them have intelligent tracking devices, so I think we are going to have to demand them to save our backs. 

There are other reasons that Uber and Lyft should install intelligent tracking devices in all their cars (as they are now doing in Singapore and a few other places), but the best “return on investment” that also includes defraying medical and chiropractic expenses is to cause alerts to be sent to drivers that they need to drive more carefully.

In the course of discussing driving with back pain, I also learned that it’s generally better to sit in the front passenger seat, to change the angle of the seat to 130 degrees, to keep your feet flat on the floor and legs at a 90 degree angle, and to put a rolled up shirt or small towel behind your back for lumbar support. 

May all your riding and driving be with drivers who treat you like the irreplaceable precious person that you are.