I would guess from my own experience as a frequent ride hailing passenger that Lyft/Uber drivers are less of a threat to cyclist safety on average than regular drivers.
I bike daily in San Francisco and that hasn't been my experience. My mental heuristics for risk to injury for me are, from least to most dangerous:
- City buses. Slow and predictable.
- Normal passenger vehicles.
- Lyft/Uber. Will often swerve right in front of me while they're pulling over. (Presumably because they're watching their phone to make sure they're dropping off in the right spot, or watching the sidewalk looking for their next fare.)
- Large pickup trucks. Not sure if it's the ride height that gives you the illusion you're further away or just a personality trait of their drivers, but a disproportionate number of my close calls are pickup trucks blasting by at high speed with no clearance.
- Old beater cars with dents/stuff falling off. These drivers can behave very unpredictably.
The increased risk is passenger's opening the door right as you bike past or jumping out at a stop light or something. with cabs you know the risk so raise your awareness but with ridesharing could be anycar as you normally can't tell from the rear whose ridesharing.
My wife used to work at a cycling advocacy organization that was often asked for feedback on bike share implementation, Ford included. I was skeptical, too, but what they told her was that they've already reached market saturation in urban areas, so if they want to grow their customer base, they have to look at forms of transportation that aren't automobiles.
Apple has a set of guidelines for public comments: they don’t restrict employees from commenting publicly entirely, but there are quite a few things they can talk about (such as products that just launched…)
I have found entering the US after visiting the EU (Schengen, technically) to be more hostile.
The EU person typically looks at me for a second or two and then stamps. Maybe they ask me how long I'm staying, I say "a week" or whatever, and they stamp.
The US people (EWR or JFK, maybe it varies) have an attitude that suggests that they think someone who visited Switzerland or Denmark is likely to be coming back from a vacation training with ISIS. They also really can't decide if my girlfriend is supposed to come to the booth with me, all of the rules suggest no since we are not a family, but then they tend to get upset after they ask me if I was traveling alone and I say no.
Interestingly enough, I travelled to the San Diego two years ago and I was expecting a round of “premium questioning” because I had a (long expired) multi-entry visa for Syria in my (now expired) passport (I was in Damascus in late 2009), but the guy didn’t care at all, just asked what the purpose of my US visit was, spent a few minutes looking at my passport and checking his computer and then he welcomed me and sent me on my way. It was all rather painless and everyone was relatively friendly.
Chrome is (or was) good. Safari is fast, but is a bit clunky and doesn’t have many extensions, and Firefox has never felt like a proper macOS app. Maybe it’s better on Windows where platform standards are less strict.
