I noticed a trend where lots of Uber drivers marked themselves as deaf, but really just didn’t communicate in English fluently. I would imagine drivers would similarly claim to be allergic to get around having to transport service animals.

What's the incentive for a driver not to mark that they have allergies? You're essentially just giving them a checkbox "I don't want to deal with people who have service animals"

As long as it is not a large enough percentage of drivers to significantly affect the service times of those riders, does it actually matter? I mean, morally I don't think they should. However, those are probably more likely to be the people who were going to cause problems like this article talks about anyways. So it would still probably result in better experience for everyone.

If 99% of drivers check that box, and it affects service times, then they will have to come up with some other option to accommodate the drivers. Prove the allergies or something, since some of them are certainly lying with prevalence being 10-20% in the US. And it would have to be a best effort, the rider with a true service animal is legally protected and a driver with allergies or fear is not a legal reason to reject service altogether.

Seems like that is pretty easy to deal with by simply asserting in the driver's contract that they can be asked for medical verification at any time if they make that indication.

What does that look like? Force drivers to go to the doctor (even though you don't give them health insurance) to get a note that says "I sneeze around dogs"?

Uber could/should pay drivers who pick up service animals more to counterbalance.

> Seems rather simple: Let drivers with allergies put that in their profile. Let riders put that they have a service animal in. And the system just doesn't pair them together.

I don't think you are allowed to require riders to say they have a service animal when requesting a ride.

You can ask two specific questions about the presence of an animal. "Is the dog a service animal required because of a disability?" and "What work or task has the dog been trained to perform?"

I would think Uber would want to handle those sort of compliance issues before the driver gets there. As you don't want the driver to get something wrong. And it just makes things smoother for everyone.

Not sure if they can require a rider provide this information ahead of time, before pairing a rider with a driver. But if its voluntary, I don't see any problem with making the process smoother for everyone. Again IANAL, so could be off base though.

Yeah, I think the issue is that you can't require the rider to say they have a service dog ahead of time.

In big metros, Uber and Lyft could just have on-call backup drivers that are specifically employees who are there to handle this situation. If the metro is not "big enough to warrant it", then Uber and Lyft shouldn't be there.

In two weeks, all Uber drivers will indicate that they are allergic to dogs. Next move?