[OT] Uber driver kidnaps child; Uber offers mom $10 rebate

Okay, that subject line is clickbait. It's TRUE but it omits a lot of detail. Here's the story:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/uber-drives-off-with-child-1.7513379
So, an Uber driver *did*, in effect, kidnap a 5 year old but it was entirely inadvertent. (Mind you, the story fails to say just when the kid woke up and realized something was amiss although it obviously did because it was in hysterics when the mom got to the Uber.)
Uber's emergency protocol leaves a LOT to be desired. The procedure calls for police to fill out a form and then wait for Uber to react but there is NO INDICATION of how long that will take. Somehow, that message needs to be read by someone who then has to decide how to respond (or even IF they will respond since they should probably do something to verify that someone claiming to be the police really IS a police officer). I've personally built forms that generate messages which then turn into properly addressed emails and sit in someone's inbox until the recipient notices them, which is appropriate for things like customer inquiries on a website. Is that what Uber does too? Or does the message go immediately to a well-trained live human being with decision-making power on a 24x7 basis? The former would be entirely inappropriate for an emergency situation but it would definitely be cheaper so I can imagine them building their system that way. I can definitely imagine the police not wanting to bother with something like this unless there was a solid guarantee that the form would be seen and acted upon IMMEDIATELY.
I hope the mother's insistence on real improvements to the Uber emergency protocol has the desired effect otherwise this could easily happen again with perhaps more tragic results. There have been a number of incidents over the years where sleeping children were left on school buses because the driver didn't notice that they were there, including one where a sleeping special needs child who was left in a bus for hours and was traumatized as a result along with its parents.
And that prompts me to suggest a policy that we used on our school buses which Uber drivers could follow starting immediately: make sure every passenger has gotten out of the vehicle before you drive away. If that means getting out of the car and looking in each door, so be it. It's only a car: how long can it take? That alone practically precludes a similar event from ever happening again. (I suppose there's still a chance that a very small child could fall asleep, slip into the footwell and half under the front seats and not be noticed, particularly if the child is wearing dark clothing at night.) Where I worked, failing to do this kind of check and then reporting to the dispatcher that you had done it was a major disciplinary event; drivers, even excellent ones, were virtually always fired if a child was actually left in the bus.
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Rhino