MADD Issues a Bogus Report on Uber and Drunk Driving, and Now We Discover that Uber Paid them Off

Last week, MADD and Uber co-released a report that strongly suggested that car sharing service reduces the incidence of drunk driving.

Pro Publica took a look at the report, and found that there was no "there" there:

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What is Uber's evidence that they "likely prevented" so many crashes?

Not much.

Indeed, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which co-authored the report, cautioned us against connecting the rise of Uber to a drop in drunk driving. "Nobody is saying that there is a causation relationship here, this is a correlation relationship. Purely correlational," said Amy George, senior vice president of marketing and communications for MADD. (MADD took a less cautious stance in a press release last week: New Report from MADD, Uber Reveals Ridesharing Services Important Innovation to Reduce Drunk Driving.)

Uber's report has two key graphics: The first shows alcohol-involved crashes in California markets where Uber operates. The second shows the same, but in cities where there is no Uber service. Each graph compares accidents between under-30 and 30-and-over drivers. The charts actually show, in general, a downward trend of drunk driving accidents in both Uber and non-Uber markets.

But Uber and Plouffe are hanging their assertion on another facet of the analysis: drunk driving crashes for those under 30 have dropped more in cities that have Uber versus those that don't.

"We believe there is a direct relationship between the presence of uberX (Uber's lowest-cost option) in a city and the amount of drunk driving crashes involving younger populations," the report says.
That could be. But we don't really know, and neither does Uber."We believe there is a direct relationship between the presence of uberX (Uber's lowest-cost option) in a city and the amount of drunk driving crashes involving younger populations," the report says.

That could be. But we don't really know, and neither does Uber.

And now we know that 6 months ago, Uber dropped a load of cash in MADD's lap:

Uber and Mothers Against Drunk Driving last week put out a report suggesting Uber helped reduced drunk-driving accidents. However, the claim gets a little wobbly when you take a closer look at the numbers, as ProPublica just did. Now MADD is backing away from the assertion, claiming the relationship is "purely correlational." Meanwhile, it turns out Uber started donating money to MADD last summer. Surely that is unrelated, right?
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Now MADD is backpedaling: "Nobody is saying that there is a causation relationship here, this is a correlation relationship. Purely correlational," Amy George, senior vice president of marketing and communications at MADD, tells ProPublica.

Funny, but last week in a press release MADD seemed to feel differently:

Released today, the study demonstrates that not only is Uber a convenient transportation option but that it can also be a powerful tool in the fight to reduce the number of drunk-driving crashes.

There's another twist, which is that Uber has been contributing financially to MADD. Last summer, Uber and MADD announced a partnership in which Uber would donate $1 to MADD for every ride taken and $10 for every new customer who used the service in a 24-hour period around the 4th of July, as long as customers used a promo code, UberMADD.This past weekend Uber ran a similar promotion, donating a buck for every ride from 3 p.m. to midnight on Super Bowl Sunday when riders used the promo code ThinkandRide.

Uber: Using lies about drunk driving deaths to promote its own agenda since 2014.

Nice work guys.

Full disclosure: My mother was killed by a drunk driver.

That being said, I'm not a fan of the various non-profits who work in this issue. I find them overly punitive in their approach, and there seems to be a lot of corruption around them: Candy Lightner, the founder of MADD, ended up working as a lobbyist for the American Beverage Institute, and SADD was forced to settle with the commonwealth of Massachusetts over the outsize golden parachute given its founder, Robert Anastas.  (The case was actually used as an example of self-dealing in the Massachusetts non-profit application form instruction book in the 1990s)