Uber has reached an agreement with the Justice Department that means it will pay more than $ 2 million to disabled users after they have been charged for waiting costs.
Reuters via BI
Uber’s time-out fare policy means that if it takes more than two minutes to start the trip after the car arrives, the company charges you per minute for the driver to wait. The rate varies by location, depending on Uber’s policy help page.
The DOJ sued Uber for the policy in November 2021 saying it discriminated against people with disabilities who might need more time to get in a car.
The DOJ said Monday in a press release that Uber would compensate more than 1,000 motorists who were contacted to complain that they were being charged waiting costs for a 1.7 million liquidation jar. dollars.
A draft complaint notice attached to the resolution agreement said that those 1,000 people who complained would get a minimum of $ 600 each from Uber. The jar divided by about 1,000 would mean that each person could get up to about $ 1,700.
The DOJ also said $ 500,000 would be distributed among “other aggrieved persons identified by the department.” He did not specify how many people he had identified.
He added that Uber agreed to credit the accounts of more than 65,000 user accounts for “twice the amount of timeout commissions charged to them.”
While the DOJ did not put an accurate figure on how much this would cost Uber, it could mean “potentially hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in compensation.”
“People with disabilities should not be made to feel second-class citizens or punished for their disability, which is exactly what Uber’s time-out fare policy did,” the prosecutor said. Deputy General Kristen Clarke in the DOJ press statement.
An Uber spokesman told Insider, “We are pleased to have reached this agreement with the Department of Justice and look forward to continuing to help everyone move easily through their communities.”
“Our policy has long been to reimburse waiting time fees for disabled users when we were notified that they were charged, and before filing this matter we made changes so that any sharing engine that has a disability would have to wait. time rates are automatically exemplified, “they added.