Car-service app Uber is sending riders on 1 million trips each day and did 140 million rides this past year, the company said in a blog post Wednesday.
Uber hasn't shared ride volume before now. The company has hinted at growth numbers in the past -- CEO Travis Kalanick said in September that the company was adding 50,000 new drivers a month -- but best guesses at ride volume have come from leaked documents. A year ago, those documents suggested the company was doing around 850,000 rides per week, so around 121,000 per day. The numbers Uber shared Wednesday mean its daily ride rate could have grown eight times this past year.
A recent FORBES analysis of Uber launch dates also showed that the company is expanding into new areas at breakneck pace -- about 30 new cities in the last 30 days. The company is currently in 53 countries and more than 250 cities.
The numbers came tucked into a long blog post about the company's new safety initiatives, which discussed changes Uber will explore after one of its drivers allegedly raped a passenger in India. The post, written by new head of Global Safety Philip Cardenas, said the company was exploring new technologies to help with driver screening -- notably to verify that a drivers' submitted identification documents are actually tied to the person they say they are.
"We are initiating research & development on biometrics and voice verification to build custom tools for enhanced driver screening," Cardenas wrote, though it's unclear what kind of identity verification processes will eventually be adopted.
Lack of biometric screening was a point of contention in a lawsuit filed against Uber last week by the San Francisco and Los Angeles District Attorneys. The suit said that Uber's current screening process lets drivers submit identification documents so that the company can run background checks on them. But Uber does not require that its drivers submit to fingerprint testing or other biometric screening, so there's nothing that the company can do to ensure that the identity being submitted for background checking is the driver and not, for example, his or her more law-abiding sibling or friend.
In the lawsuit, the district attorneys were not able to force Uber to change its background check process but did ask that the company remove all references to its background check process being "industry-leading" since it does not include fingerprints. Taxi driver in most major California cities are required to undergo LiveScan background checks, which involve fingerprinting.
The post also says Uber is working to patch holes in its background check process, exploring options that range from polygraph tests to building their own background checks on top of existing options, which the company says it's doing in India.
"Our responsibility is to leverage every smart tool at our disposal to set the highest standard in safety we can," Cardenas wrote. "We will not shy away from this task."
