building a better bay area moving forlutions. this is abc 7 news. hi there. i'm kristen z. you're watching getting answers on abc 7 every day. we talk with experts about issues important to the bay area and we get answers for you in real time. today. we have the results of news report on rideshare discrimination. we talked to the senior staff attorney from the asian law caucus about workers' rights for uber and lyft drivers. also, have you ever dreamed about making a pitch to the sharks on shark tank? we talked to a casting producer about what it takes to get on the show and to a native san francisco who takes a dive on tonight's shark tank about her products, but first many commuters have concerns about the new 101 express lanes on the peninsula with tolling just starting for the new section today joining us live.

now is tasha bartholomew the spokesperson for the san mateo county 101 express lanes project tasha. thanks for your time. thank you. alright, so today is the first day of this northern section, right? tell us about it. yeah, today is the first day that we have begun tolling on the full quarter of the san mateo county express lanes about a year ago. we opened up the southern section and so now which was about eight miles and so now this is the remaining 14 miles that is now been completed. and so it is completely open now from the san mateo county santa clara county line to interstate 380 in south san francisco. okay, and we see the newly open section today here on that graphic. it was the yellow part from redwood city all the way up to south san francisco. and as you mentioned it's 14 miles talk about the tolling and the hours. yeah, so the hours of the tolling are from 5 am to 8 pm

and you know. mateo is not. this project is not unique to just san mateo county. i think those who've been driving around in the bay area have experienced express lanes, so they prod so most people probably know that it's based on dynamic pricing which is when you know the price of the the price to use a lane goes up or down depending on how crowded the lane is, but basically, you know, it's open, you know from 5 am to 8pm daily and if people choose to use the express lanes, it's really important that i mentioned that they have one of the fast tracks flicks transponders. it's not the old one, but the new one because that is when you can actually switch, you know, the lever to say how many people are occupied inside the car. oh, i see i have i think an old one. there's no lover. i still use it to cross the bridges but you're saying that is not going to work for these toe lanes. no, the new fast track flex is the one that you need because it

gives you the option of one two, or three or more drivers. and so if you do, you know if you are carpooling or vanpooling or there's more, you know people aside from an individual driver in the car, then it's going to be free if you need three right three any three people for it to be. yeah, well three or more for it to be free into account it. to his discounted it's half off whatever the pricing is at that point. okay. i know it's variable pricing. however, what is the max? i had a friend say she was trying to go through a three-mile section of palo alto or something around there and it was going to be ten dollars. dollars. that is pretty astronomical. yeah, when we've done observations on the on the southern portion we have seen well a minimum anima maximum. we've seen it as low as 50 cents and we've also seen it at the highest that you know at $12.

yes. it's it's seems steep. but again, this is an option for people to take this is not something that is mandatory if they choose to use the lane. yeah, but when it's something like twelve dollars like when does it get price that high is it when that lane is filled to almost capacity where like if you didn't charge that much there would just be many cars in it. yeah, i think it's it's when when there are more cars on the road. okay, though. are there any equity concerns here in the sense that you know, you know some critics call it lexus lanes in the sense that you have to have the money to be in that lane. otherwise, you may have a job that you're gonna you're trying to rush to but you get fire perhaps if you're not there on time you may be in a job where you don't get to set your own hours or work from home. and those are the people being punished. what do you say to to folks who think that why i don't know if it's people being punished, but what i well i will say is when you in terms of equity something that we have been trying to do

at least to think about are transportation transportation benefits program that we have. so that is equitable for you know for individuals. maybe not in the scenario that you provided but you know, maybe for those low income individuals who you know may want to use a lanes but can't afford to do so. we've been working with a nonprofit organization in san mateo county specifically that helps provide free service free services to individuals call samaritan house where they can help people sign up for our for our transportation benefits program where if a person qualifies that they can choose from either having a hundred dollar transit credit on the clipper card if they don't drive and only use transit or they can get a hundred dollar toll credit on a fast track transponder if they drive i see and i don't know what the threshold for income is, but let's say someone makes $100,000 a year. that is a pretty good income

certainly above, you know, the medium for many bay area cities. let's say you had to take that and pay $10 a day five days a week in a year. that's 2,600. i mean someone making a hundred thousand dollars can how can they afford the additional 2600? well again the using the express lanes is a choice. it's not something that is mandatory to do. you know, i would say, you know part of the one of the key the key benefits of this program or what we've been trying to do is encouraging people to you know to to carpool and vanpool so that it does take some cars off of the road and makes 101 a little bit easier. i know that you know for years 101's been a very crowded core or for us, but you know, like i said one of the key projects for that is, you know is encouraging, you know, carpooling and transit use and and having multiple people in the car so that it's not so many individual drivers on the road

so that it does that so tasha was this a new adeline then i mean this is is a takeaway from an existing lane that used to be free to all or is this the addition of a new lane? this is an addition of a new lane. okay, and that happened in the southern portion south of redwood city. past san jose as you said that's been open for eight months. it has there been any evidence that shows whether it has helped achieve the goals that the set out to do right reducing some of the traffic increasing carpooling if you will and helping the environment anything to suggest that those goals are being achieved through this. yeah, i think we're still continuing to observe that i know that at, you know peak traffic that we still see vehicles that i'm traveling at 45 miles per hour, but you know the from what i understand that, you know, the express lanes are still performing well and keeping the flow of traffic going but you know, we're still we're still it's only been a

year. we're still observing, you know, traffic patterns are changing and you know pre-covid highway 101 was extremely crowded and then coach, you know in the heart of covid, you know wasn't as many people on the road. so we're still you know monitoring, you know, the traffic flow really quickly on on 101 right now, but it's as far but as far as i know, you know it it's not it's not hurting. okay, and finally, where will the money collected go? um, so one it'll go know, maintaining maintaining the whole system two, it could go towards, you know, making some improvement continue to improvements on 101 and in addition as i mentioned the transportation bef ioha m. ton isoing bk intohe co i know youai n peoply

forne if the need a fatt? t onl ak ordered online and the turnaround for that is pretty quick. you can call i think you can also pick one up if someone is you know out in the community if they're at like a costco or a walgreens they can pick one up there as well. all right, i know i said that was the last question but one more again, i'm gonna squeeze in there and that is is there enforcement what people get ticketed and how would you catch people if they didn't have a fast track or didn't have three people? yeah that the new technology can monitor that and take so just as though you were going on the bridge and let's say you didn't have your fast track and you went through the you went, you know through the bridge toll you didn't have a fast track. it captures it and you get a notification it would work in the same way. got it. all right. thank you so much sasha bartholomew for coming on to answer our questions about the

new one-on-one express lane that's open now the north section. thank you so much. thank you. coming up a new rideshare discrimination report will talk to someone from the asian law caucus about workers rights for uber and lyft drivers. we'll be right back. here to tell you about life insurance through the colonial penn program. if you're age 50 to 85, and looking to buy life insurance on a fixed budget, remember the three ps. the three what? the three ps? what are the three ps? the three ps of life insurance on a fixed budget are price, price, and price. a price you can afford, a price that can't increase, and a price that fits your budget. i'm 54 and was a smoker, but quit. what's my price? you can get coverage for $9.95 a month. i'm 65, retired, and take medications. what's my price? also $9.95 a month.

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a new study by the asian law caucus finds racial disparities for deactivated rideshare drivers the report surveyed more than 800 current and former uber and lyft drivers in california to better understand their experiences as workers and how discrimination may play a role joining us live now are winnie cow the senior staff attorney from the asian law caucus and nicole moore a rideshare driver and the president of rideshare drivers united winnie and

nicole. thank you for your time. thanks be here. i think this is a collaborative survey, right but i do want to start with you winnie and you talk about why this was conducted. was there something that prompted you to ask these questions? sure. well my office had been helping a lot of low-wage workers and drivers among them during the pandemic with emergency relief and during that time. we were working with rideshare drivers united and learned that correct and learned that drivers were all so struggling with what the rideshare companies have euphemistically called deactivation, which is essentially being fired by the app you wake up one day and you're not even fired by a human being you just find you can't log on to the app anymore and for a lot of these drivers where it's their primary source of income and their way to support their families. it's devastating and so many of these drivers have no indication

or explanation or but about what the reason is for the their deactivation and no meaningful way to challenge it. okay. so let's take a closer look at the study and it's findings. i know you looked at several questions and one of them involves whether drivers from certain racial backgrounds that we can put that up are more likely to be deep platformed. so let's look at this graph and you tell me what you found. um, yeah, we found that two thirds of all survey drivers were experiencing deactivation but drivers of color and immigrant drivers were definitely disproportionately impacted on the job discrimination and harassment from customers was surprisingly frequent yet their complaints to uber and lyft went largely unheated there were also alarming rates of sexual harassment and violence while driving for the platforms across genders and drivers who were facing negative consequences when they try to influence who would safety guidelines during the height of the pandemic. let's just leave this up here a

little bit. you can see east asian drivers had the highest rate of deactivation being kicked off the platform essentially fired followed by south asian and then arab middle eastern mixed race hispanic native american black southeast, asian and finally white with the lowest rate of deactivation, although as you said is still a lot nicole you drive in los angeles. i know can you talk about what kinds of things might lead to deactivation based on what you've seen amongst your friends? perhaps people, you know drivers, you know, i think it's based on the ratings right whether customers give you the five stars or one star. yeah, i mean ratings are a big part of it as our customer complaints and what we've found. however, is that a lot of times if you're doing certain things as a driver to keep yourself safe for instance asking passengers to put on a mask during the covid pandemic people can push back and say no.

i don't want to and give you a bad rating those ratings shouldn't count towards whether or not we keep our jobs. we're enforcing safety standards and you know, honestly, we're the only thing that can do safety enforcement in our cars and we are retaliated by some passengers that way and you can get a complaint that can shut you out of the app for four or five days, but there's no opportunity for you to actually say here's what happened. you know, here's my dash cam that video, you know to show that nothing happened i did wrong. so that's that's the issue that it's really not a fair process. we want drivers to be good drivers. we went passengers to be good passengers. we're not against enforcing, you know things that go wrong, right, but when things are not true and then we're knocked out

of our job for a week and sometimes permanently based on false accusations. it's a problem. yeah interesting. what you mentioned about drivers trying to enforce covid safety, for example, winnie, i wonder if that might perhaps perhaps explain the higher rate of complaints against asian drivers right where there's a higher mask usage rate during the pandemic certainly, but what about things like just culture and speaking with an accent? did your study look into that? it did it did find disproportionate impact on immigrant drivers in terms of immigrant drivers experiencing deactivation and limited english proficiency did play a role as well. but yeah, we were shocked by a lot of these findings two and three drivers recording facing customer discrimination while driving 43% of survey drivers reported experiencing sexual harassment on the job. those 47% reported being touched

inappropriately by passengers and like nicole said that juxtaposed with the impact of customer ratings and complaints on driver pay benefits and ability to keep working is really troubling and nicole mentioned. there's really no way to appeal like not even by showing the dash cam video what really happened i mean is there once you're kicked off in d platform, so to speak is a really no way to kind of press your case? yes, i mean i can find, you know, somebody at the hub who will actually listen to you. um, and then has the power to make the change us often. we're put on to calls that are in other countries who may not even know what we're talking about when we are trying to state our case so we have we're we're very limited in our contact and it's true many many drivers have not had their dash cam footage even accepted in

these in these cases and you know, i mean, i think the important thing to know is that this impacts all drivers, right? all drivers are experiencing it and what's happening. is that the data which comes from the passengers that ride in the back of our cars, right? it goes into an algorithm. that's bits out what america is dishing out and america is dishing out a lot of fairness for all workers, but it's this proportionately impacting drivers of color and drivers who are immigrants. so we're almost out of time but winnie it just in 20 seconds real quickly. what are you calling on the companies or perhaps regulators or policymakers to do? um, nicole can speak to this probably better but it's we're asking that basic workplace protections be extended to all workers. it doesn't matter employee independent contractor. i mean basic things like work being entitled to a safe

workplace healthy workplace safety net benefits to be in a workplace that's free of discrimination retaliation and harassment. those are basic things. never mind minimum wage over time and other wage in our protections, but also just cause due process. i think that those are key to protecting workers winnie cowan nicole moore. thank you both so much really appreciate the conversation. we'll be right back. more paper being crumpled music: “i wish” by skee-lo boom! sound of paper balls landing in bins office workers cheering music stops why do we shoot baskets with paper balls? for the same reason we play scratchers from the california lottery. because a little play can make your day. logo scratches on

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casting producer, mindy zamrac fiona, mindy. thank you so much for coming on the show. thank you for having us. okay, so fiona you are in the hot seat tonight right pitching your makeup line to our viewers. so give us the quick pitch right now. so we make makeup you can sleep in and we are best known for creating the world's first color changing blush. what's really unique about our products? is that unlike other makeup products, which can contain a lot of fossil fuels or liquid microplastics. we formulate all of our products in a plant-based way. this also has an added skincare benefit and we are best known for our byo blush. this is a world's first color changing blush oil your reacts your skin's ph to give you the perfect shade. ff color, but it's so easy to use what? okay. let's see if we put it on i mean, i don't know. i don' t' s cool. i've seen color changing nail polish, but blush. wow mindy. is that why you cast fiona because of the unique product,

or was it something else her personal qualities? it's both actually. we love fiona. she's obviously a fantastic entrepreneur and she has an amazing company that we were really excited and had never seen in the in the previous 14 season. so we i already know what happens because i was there, but we're really excited to see how she does tonight when she airs and have hopefully her sales see us skyrocket increased for sure. oh, there it is. okay. i see her putting it on fiona. this is cool. and i think something else that's cool is i've looked at your social media and you really talk about and feature your mom. she's been a big influence to you hasn't she? she definitely has i think i always like to formulate products that are inclusive and i mean that by like different age ranges and different skin types and i always love to showcase our products on my mom because it always looks so great on her. she looks amazing, but why do we need makeup we can sleep in for me i used to travel a lot and i used to always fall asleep in my makeup and i always hated

feeling so guilty. i've gone to the hospital a couple times with these allergic reactions. i just wanted something where if i'm putting it on if i'm putting it on my face for a couple hours a day. i don't have to worry about it. it makes my skin better and you know, i always think if you can't sleep in it, why do we feel like you're comfortable wearing it in the day? i see. all right, that makes sense like mindy the show is going strong. i think it's in its 14th season, right? what do you think the appeal is? yes, so, you know we've been going for 14 years. we're already casting right now for season 15. we're well underway, and i think the reason that the show is continuing on is because of what it represents. it represents american entrepreneurs doesn't matter your race or your age or anything really at any kind of stage that your business is in and you know, our sharks have resources and you know many different connections to launch businesses to a level that they haven't seen and i think that

entrepreneurship is very mainstream now, it's less kind of, you know look down upon and a lot of people are out there leaving their jobs to be their own boss and and follow their dreams and that's what we're all about is is celebrating on our entrepreneurs that are in our country real quickly mindy. how do people apply and then i want fiona to have the final word. they can go to abc.com click on shark tank, and we also just open open announced our first open call in three years today. it'll be at the end of the month in los angeles. alright, so check that out. so fiona, how was it? i know you prepared must have been nerve-racking going before the judges. how did you? either it was such a fun experience and i yeah, i recommend it. it was just a really fun dream come true. all right, was it what you thought it would be i mean did any surprise any surprise pop up any of the judges surprise you um, i think so. i think you just never know what can happen in the tank, but i

just felt like it was a really fun experience. all right. well, i'm glad to hear it. you can definitely see how fiona does tonight and learn more about her makeup line euphoria youth euphoria. i got to pronounce that a little better for you and mindy thank you as well. i hope you get a lot of great contestants for next season. thank you so much. alright, thank you. all right folks once again, you can catch fiona tonight making her pitch to the sharks on shark tank at 8pm right here on abc 7 and we'll be right back.

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for getting answers today. we'll be here every weekday at 3:00 answering questions with experts from around the bay area world news tonight with david muir is next and i'll see you back here at 4.

tonight, the abc news exclusive. the juror inside that room as the jury found alex murdaugh guilty. what it was he says sealed murdaugh's fate. also tonight, the storms headed into the northeast at this hour. the tornados and straight line winds already. we'll time this out. first tonight, the new image of alex murdaugh just in tonight, sentenced to life in prison now. and tonight hear that exclusive interview, one of the jurors taking us inside the deliberations. how many thought he was guilty, how many not guilty, and how they came to a consensus so quickly. and alex murdaugh addressing the judge today, saying i'm innocent, and what the judge said back to him. eva pilgrim just back from the courthouse right here with us tonight. also, as we come on the air, those powerful storms sweeping through the south intth