A top San Francisco transportation official has renewed calls for the California Public Utilities Commission to release information on collisions and assaults involving Uber and Lyft ride-hailing trips in the city, following a Public Press investigation into the agency’s handling of company reports.
“The time for making this data available to local agencies and the public is long overdue,” Myrna Melgar, chair of the San Francisco County Transportation Authority and the District 7 supervisor, said in an email.
After declaring that it would be an “injustice” to deny the public access to the information, the state commission recently voted to further delay release of the last six years of trip data in order to reconsider Lyft’s latest request to withhold it.
The utilities commission regulates ride-hailing and is the only agency in the state to collect mandatory annual reports from each company that include the number and details of rides, collisions and assaults. It has been gathering the information since it legalized ride-hailing in California in 2013, but has released little of it, denying local officials’ repeated requests on the grounds that the data is confidential.
Melgar said cities like San Francisco need access to the ride-hailing data for public safety, traffic planning and designing efficient public transportation.
“We are in the dark,” she said, even about basic information like the number of Uber and Lyft trips occurring in the city.
The county authority monitors transit trends and develops, funds and oversees local transportation projects. Drew Cooper, a senior analyst at the authority, said it is well known that ride-hailing vehicles divert riders from publicly funded transportation systems and increase road congestion. But because the commission has withheld the data, Cooper said, “we don’t know how the ride-hailing market has changed with the growth of autonomous vehicles and post-Covid travel, and we don’t know how these changes affect our transportation system.”
Assaults increase, secrecy continues
San Francisco officials want to know also whether ride-hailing firms are adequately serving various populations, including people who live in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods or are disabled, Cooper said.
And they want information about the incidence of alleged assaults against both passengers and drivers. Without access to the state data, local planers learn of assaults only from news media reports, he said.
The commission has kept the data secret even as the number of assault complaints has grown, with thousands of Uber and Lyft passengers across the nation suing the companies for alleged failure to take necessary steps to prevent the attacks. The firms have denied the claims.
The recent Public Press investigation, part of its continuing coverage of the secrecy around the ride-hailing data, was based on documents released under the California Public Records Act. It found that the commission’s handling of the information has hindered its oversight of the industry and obscured whether it is fulfilling its mission of protecting the public.
Commission records show it collected data from each company inconsistently, meaning it could not be used for comparisons, and failed to assign sufficient staff and resources to the effort, causing up to nine months’ delay in processing it. Only in 2025 did the agency contract with California State University, Chico, to help review the voluminous data.
Terrie D. Prosper, the commission’s director of external affairs, did not respond to several emails seeking comment for this story.
Prosper previously said the agency had acted to address safety issues in the ride-hailing industry, including those of sexual assault and harassment. She said also that it had worked to correct problems with “data integrity” in its collection of the annual reports.
The state utilities commission’s initial 2013 regulations for the ride-hailing industry required the annual reports but at the same time deemed them confidential. In 2020, the agency reversed the presumption of confidentiality and required firms to specify why certain data needed to be kept confidential, for example to protect personal privacy or trade secrets. The agency issued several decisions finding much of the information should be made public.
But commission records show the agency has since allowed Uber and Lyft to file numerous repetitive administrative challenges to releasing the data, even though the agency’s own officials had previously rejected their arguments.
In August 2025, the commission ruled that the public interest in releasing the annual reports for 2021 through 2024 outweighed the companies’ interest in keeping the trip data in them confidential as trade secrets. The commission declared that “it would be an injustice” to continue withholding the data from the public.
But then Lyft filed another challenge to that ruling, and the agency issued a stay of its disclosure order so it could consider Lyft’s request for a rehearing. In July, the commission voted to grant Lyft’s request to reconsider the public interest finding.The matter is pending.
Autonomous vehicles pose new risks
Melgar noted the agency has withheld similar data about the performance of autonomous vehicles, which pose “new risks,” citing incidents during a Dec. 20 electrical blackout and the July 4 celebration, when many of the vehicles stalled in traffic, creating congestion and safety concerns.
She added that the commission’s refusal to share assault data with local governments also was concerning because the agency was considering whether to let unaccompanied minors ride autonomous vehicles.
Uber and Lyft say problems occur on a tiny percentage of rides and that they have added many security features. But the firms have long sought to conceal the extent of such incidents, urging the commission to keep the data they file with it secret to protect confidential business information and personal privacy.
Loretta Lynch, president of the commission from 2000 through 2002 and a commissioner until 2005, previously told the Public Press that the agency has the legal power to publish at least some anonymized ride-hailing data, such as total numbers of assaults, collisions and drunk-driving incidents on a state- or countywide basis.
Lynch said the agency’s withholding the ride-hailing data is “an egregious dereliction and abdication of their statutory responsibilities” and suggests it is putting “the companies’ business interests above its own duty to promote transparency and protect the safety of Californians.”
This story was supported by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism. Previous articles in this series were produced in partnership with the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.
See previous reporting in our ongoing series, Ride Hailing’s Dark Data.
