Uber will ban riders in South Africa with “persistently bad feedback”, the ride-hailing giant said on Monday.

The company is introducing a new “rider-quality system” to weed out bad apples who consistently get low ratings from drivers, it said in a statement.

“Uber will soon begin notifying a small number of riders who have consistently received bad feedback from drivers that they must improve their behaviour or they could lose access to the Uber app,” it said.

Alon Lits, GM for Uber Sub-Saharan Africa, said: “We have recently updated our community guidelines, extending the same behavioural standards to riders that we have for driver-partners and we will be notifying a small number of riders that their behaviour needs to improve or their access to the app could be removed — which is already done with drivers.”

With this new policy, when Uber sees a pattern of riders getting consistently bad feedback, they will receive a warning and will be given advice on how to improve.

If they continue to receive bad feedback from drivers after being warned, the next step will be to suspend their account for one week. If still there is no improvement, they will “eventually face the possibility of full deactivation”.

‘Two-way street’

“Being a member of the Uber community means treating others the way they want to be treated,” the company said in the statement.

“It’s a two-way street: riders rate drivers and drivers rate riders. Drivers are rated on a range of factors” did they help the rider in and out of the car, was the ride smooth and safely executed, did the driver treat the rider with respect and make the rider feel comfortable. Riders will now share accountability on their behaviour, such as: how did they treat the driver and their vehicle, did they push the driver to break the speed limit because they were running late, and were they rude or abusive to the driver?” — (c) 2019 NewsCentral Media