App based delivery drivers have a tough gig. They navigate aggressive drivers, hostile restaurant workers, and impatient customers while their paycheck hangs in the balance. Manage it all perfectly, and their algorithmic overlord lets them move on to the next delivery. Let a car accident, construction detour, or act of fate throw off the timeline, and the app responds with consequences ranging from reduced ratings to outright deactivation — a digital pink slip cutting them off from, in many cases, their only source of income.
As it turns out, that kind of pressure has real consequences for the decisions delivery drivers make on the road. A new study slated for publication in the journal Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives next month took a look at why delivery drivers speed — and the answer seems to have less to do with reckless habits of individual workers, and more to do with the system those workers are trapped inside.
To conduct the study, researchers combed through the subreddits associated with the top three delivery app companies, DoorDash, GrubHub, and UberEats, to collect thousands of comments mentioning or referring to the choice to speed, and sorting each comment based on the factors involved.
The reason drivers put the pedal down — or didn’t — fell into two broad categories: work stuff, and everything else. On the work side, the main motivation to speed was the on-time delivery rate. Miss enough of them, and drivers face deactivation. Personal attitudes like a general belief that speeding is no big deal also showed up, but not as often. Overall, job factors were a much bigger deal than individual attitudes.
“I don’t pay a lot of attention to my arrival time history, but it kind of bothers me that to be on time for about 75 percent of my trips, I’d have to exceed the speed limit rather a little bit,” one of the drivers commented.
Intriguingly, the apps that track on-time rates also monitor how fast drivers are going, a significant factor among those who decided not to speed. Non-speeding drivers also cited checks of their road safety records by law enforcement as a major factor, indicative of the overlapping layers of surveillance gig delivery drivers have to navigate to earn a living.
As the researchers note, many of the factors identified in the study are unique to gig workers, like deactivation risk, on-time delivery, and financial pressure. Luckily, the study identifies a number of ways app companies can reduce unsafe driving.
For example, companies could relax on-time delivery metrics, allowing drivers to feel less pressure to complete each delivery at lightning speed. App companies could also be more transparent about how they monitor drivers, and switch from a penalty-based system to an incentive-based one.
A spokesperson for one of the companies mentioned in the study, GrubHub, told us they have a “zero-tolerance policy for unsafe driving — an expectation we clearly communicate to all our couriers.”
On the topic of on-time delivery metrics, the spokesperson said that “delivery ETAs are calculated using a number of factors, including route, distance, and traffic conditions. They assume adherence to the rules of the road, allowing delivery partners to get from the restaurant to the customer safely.”
Overall, nobody wants unsafe drivers on the road. But until app companies get serious about treating their drivers like workers rather than independent contractors, the structural issues pushing drivers to make the roads less safe will remain in place.
More on gig workers: Mamdani Forces Delivery Apps to Pay Back $4.6 Million Cheated From Drivers
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