Passengers' safety must be above profit

A 20-year-old woman was raped and killed by a Didi Chuxing hitch carpooling driver in Wenzhou, Zhejiang province, on Friday. On May 5, an airline stewardess was raped and killed in Zhengzhou, Henan province, by the driver of a car registered under his father's name with Didi Chuxing, China's largest online car-hailing platform.

After the Zhengzhou case, many people expected the operators of the car-hailing service to take precautionary measures to guarantee passengers' safety, by installing the local positioning and emergence calling systems in the cars. In fact, after the May 5 tragedy the company said it would introduce measures to improve the safety of passengers. These measures included enabling passengers to share their routes and destinations with emergency contacts, extending facial recognition requirements to other services, redesigning its emergency help function, limiting the hours during which carpool drivers can pick up passengers of the opposite sex and testing an "escort mode" on its app. But most of these are still to be implemented.

The Ministry of Transport's department in charge of managing the taxi industry once warned that a monopoly in the internet-based car-hailing service sector could compromise the safety and interests of consumers. But such services are an inevitable part of the sharing economy, and cannot be banned as they offset the shortage of traditional taxis in cities. So the authorities must make full use of the social resources to ensure only registered vehicles and qualified and verified drivers enter the car-hailing sector, so as to ensure passengers' safety.