he's not my boyfriend

Lyft rides, sexual assault, and the underbellies of the gig economy.

We stumble upon the ending notes of East Sixth, past the slow death of an old pop song, through crowds of slurred shouts of nothing, shuffling to the right of a woman in a little black dress, and an interrogating cop on her left, and along rows of sparse storefronts full of star-studded Texas knick-knacks. The smells of aged local beer and smoky tequila are replaced with food trucks at the turn of the corner, off to Red River we go. There’s a soft chaos of workers scrambling to prepare for rush hour, and the aftermath of grease on a fryer wafts through my nose. Approaching Eighth, we hear drops of live music, the wails of a guitar string falling into a Southern drawl, seemingly as long as possible, as if holding onto a city that once was.

A traditional taco truck fights for relevance amid some fusion fare in the parking lot behind us as my brother, his girlfriend, and I wait for the Lyft. I balance my feet on the edge of the sidewalk curve, as if I’m in some video game, the ground below a rushing river full of snakes and alligators, but more realistically, remnants of an old burger wrapper and some used cigarettes. The Lyft driver zips around the corner in four minutes as promised and is up against the curb as if they have done this a hundred times before. The drunken partygoers who crowd the streets in unpredictable routes are no longer a surprise.

My brother instinctively checks the license plate number to make sure it matches the one on his app, and we slide in the back seat of a late 2000s Honda hatchback. Behind the driver’s seat, I take notice of a ponytail full of dark, wild curls wrapping around the beige headrest. My stomach reduces to a familiar feeling of relief. Or maybe it is surprise? Years of ridesharing later, and I still feel as though I can count the female drivers I’ve had on my hands and feet.

“Hey y’all, I’m Tanya,” she says.

“Nice to meet you,” we say.

We speed away before halting momentarily at the sight of jaywalker, a woman in a silvery gray dress and a set of four-inch heels. We turn another corner and a man in white sneakers, indistinguishable from the other men in white sneakers, steps off the sidewalk and into the street as if the road is his dance floor. It’s like a game of Mario Kart, navigating the downtown streets on a Friday night.

“Is this common?” my brother’s girlfriend asks Tanya. There is an unspoken agreement between the three of us that we are all too sophisticated now, getting older, where we can question and poke and prod at the antics of underage drinkers, of those in college still finding themselves. Isn’t that why we’re going home before midnight, after all?

“Common,” Tanya says. “You just have to get used to it and accept as the driver that you have to slow down. No one can be trusted.”

“How long have you been driving for?”

“Been doing this for six years now.”

“Anyone puke in your car?” my brother chimes in.

“Yeah.” Tanya snorts. “Once or twice every three months, maybe.” My brother mutters sheeesh and his girlfriend wrinkles her nose. There’s a casualness to Tanya’s voice, as if she is relaying how many times she may get her hair trimmed or mow her lawn, check the tire pressure or pick a new nail color at the salon. I wonder if the inconvenience becomes easier, if she has a guy or a gal at some local auto shop, that even with the damage compensation, she has somehow still found a way to work the system of Sixth Street.

“You see a lot over the years.” There’s a darker turn in Tanya’s voice.

“Oh yeah? What do you see?” My brother’s girlfriend looks towards her. My head rotates from watching the highway to picking out details in the car. I make note of a gum wrapper on the floor, then back to the yellow strips dividing the road, illuminated by moonlight. I always forget how wide the roads can be under a Texas sky.

“Partygoers passing out. Hospital visits. One girl left her phone in my car when she was getting her stomach pumped.” We all respond in surprise and forced resonation, even though we have no idea what it is like to drive a twenty-year-old to the ER as part of our occupation.

“The craziest experience was a few months back. A party on the West Side. A guy and a girl hopped in the back seat. The girl was on the right and the guy was the on left. Just a normal couple,” Tanya says. “Or so I thought.”

Tanya pauses before continuing and my mind travels to various scenarios: A married couple fighting, Tanya witnessing a break-up in real-time, or maybe another puking incident combined with some bizarre coupledom screaming match.

“I saw the man sliding over to her side in my rearview mirror. And I saw the girl in the corner of my eye sliding against the side of the car. She was trying not to look at him. I could start to tell that she didn’t want to be there,” Tanya says. She lets out a deep breath. “I’m not sure if she knew where she was going, but something seemed off. You could see it in her eyes.” Lets out a sigh, a sadness.

I picture it in my head—the subtle move every woman knows, inching away without being too offensive, curling into an imaginary box and asking not to be opened. Tanya, from the front seat, detecting this act of enclosure, seemingly knowing every iteration, because she has probably been there too. We all have. In that same box, begging to be sealed and shipped back to a safer place.

“That was the first time I had to drive off without the passenger,” Tanya says.

“What’d you do?” I ask. We all lean forward in anticipation.

“I pulled over.” Tanya tells us she went through a questionnaire process on the app that would allow her to cancel the ride. It is important to know that the male passenger had ordered the ride. There were some technicalities behind this. He could begin a war with customer service afterward, venting about an unfair cancellation, and for the fact that he was getting dropped off on the side of the road. As the driver, she could initially be blamed and incur an immediate pay loss should the app side with the customer.

“And how do you give proof that someone is a creep?” Tanya shakes her head.

Then, Tanya tells us, there was everything that could have gone wrong on the side of the road, once the man knew that she knew. And did Tanya only know because of what is unspoken between two women? Was it the girl’s fate that she hopped into a car driven by one of the few female drivers that might have existed at the time in her zip code?

“I asked them both to hop out. The girl quickly got back in and slammed the door and told me to drive off. I was scared. But I’m glad I was paying attention.” Tanya says. “She kept saying ‘don’t touch me.’ If it was her boyfriend, she wouldn’t have pushed away.” I understand boyfriend to be the term Tanya uses as a placeholder for consensual.

“Wow,” I say, abruptly, though it seems like a silly deduction for the calamity of the situation.

“You want to know something else that was crazy?”

Tanya tells us that the same man had taken her driver’s information from the app and located her on Facebook a few weeks later. (He was able to glean enough details from her profile to track her down.) He sent her a message and asked if she would be interested in hooking up. “That’s when I reported him to the police,” she says.

I’m surprised but I’m not, by the audacity.

“You don’t think you’ll be dealing with the police. It’s just an available job.” Tanya reported the incident, showing evidence from the Facebook exchange. She speaks with a hint of normality in her voice, as if six years later, this is all expected, commonplace even. She seems to find the Facebook message amusing, the presumption of a man believing that after that night, after she kicked him out of the car, he could possibly believe she’d have a hint of interest in him. As if accepting that her position as a gig economy worker opens up her personal information to later be tracked down and used to harass her, but what alternative does she have?

Tanya drops us off in Bee Cave. I realize that music has been playing at a low volume, some pop song I don’t recognize. There is an eerie quietness in the hills outside of downtown. A stillness. I feel a pang of ickiness in my stomach.

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In 2024, my search engine yields more actionable results than in previous years when I type in “Lyft,” “sexual assault,” and “safety regulations.”

Articles on lawsuits against Lyft and Uber for sexual assault (mostly focused on driver misconduct) floods the first page. I read through some of the content posted on Lyft’s and Uber’s websites focused on company policies on sexual assault. A few articles in, I realize that much of the language affirms my own previous bias: When people think about cases of sexual assault in ridesharing, they think of drivers against riders, or riders against (typically female) drivers. Little is accounted for when it comes to the backseat.

Back in the spring, I noticed I was on some new feature called Women+ Connect that allegedly matches me with more female drivers. Women started popping up in droves. I met a kind and interesting woman from South America who shared stories behind the meaning of her various tattoos and gave me a great female tattoo artist recommendation in LA. By the end of the ride, I wanted to be her friend. Then, by May, the female drivers I shared rides with had mostly waned, perhaps due to a mismatched market as more female-identifying users clicked the newly-added option preference.

Even with comprehensive training, I wonder if a male driver, or any driver for that matter, could have understood what was happening in the backseat. Would they have picked up on social cues with the appropriate contextual interpretation? I also wonder what would have happened if the man had been more violent, if the driver and the female passenger hadn’t been able to speed away without physical conflict.

And another question that I hesitate to prompt: Is it unfair to expect (or to judge, in the absence of action) that a driver must perform duties beyond getting passengers from point A to point B? When a driver cohort ranges from those driving a few hours a week for some extra cash to those relying on ridesharing for their livelihood (who are frequently overworked, underpaid, and exhausted), expecting each driver’s constant alertness and responsibility to all of ridesharing’s underbellies trickles with a bizarre layer of added servitude often characteristic of gig technology companies. I wonder how capitalistic incentives may align or go against promoting driver morality and its subsequent calling for bravery. Does Lyft’s financial liability for sexual assault cases align with additional driver pay for handling associated crises? It’s a bizarre question to ponder in the context of being a human (and not just an employee). I fear that if it did, tangible action would have come earlier in the company’s lifetime, and I fear that Tanya is more likely an exception than a norm.

When I go back to Austin in 2024 to visit my brother and his wife, the city is unrecognizable. In this new era, luxury apartments pop up and new tech companies open offices. Students from UT Austin flood the streets on the latest brand of scooter transportation, drunkenly slipping out of the designated bike lanes and onto the main streets. My aunt flew into town from Portland and over brunch, she ruminates that the city’s evolution from her last visit in the eighties is both baffling and disappointing. (I should disclose that she is a bit of a Luddite.) My cousin, formerly in a funk band for most of his twenties, joined Facebook in his thirties as he began to start a family, and was let go during one of many ritualistic series of layoffs within the tech industry since 2020. His family’s house is a home, and not an investment, but maybe one day it will be. There is a pending public transportation project in an attempt to counteract the rising population and looming increase in traffic from outskirt neighborhoods, where affordable housing is becoming more available than in the heart of the city. Some say it’s a band-aid, others say it’s progress. Regardless, the city prepares for problems not yet fully felt at scale, its growth revealing what one may wish not to see.

[Names changed for privacy]

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