Most tables on a Friday arrive inside the same twenty minutes, and a good share of them arrive in a car nobody at the table owns. That is not a scheduling quirk. A dinner built around a wine list ends with somebody deciding who drives, and in this city the answer is increasingly nobody. Guests get dropped at the curb, eat for two hours, and leave from the same six feet of pavement they walked in on.
The shift changes small operational things. Curb access matters more than the size of the lot. Servers pace the last course differently when a table is watching a phone for a pickup window instead of settling in over another glass.
Riding instead of driving takes one risk off the table and puts a quieter one on it. A passenger sits in a car they did not choose, driven by someone they did not vet, on a stretch of road they are not watching. When something goes wrong in that seat, sorting out who is responsible is not as clean as it is when you rear-end someone in your own vehicle. There is the driver, there is the platform the driver was logged into, and there is whoever else was on the road at the time.
That is a question for a lawyer rather than a customer service line in an app. Tingey Injury Law Firm, which works out of Las Vegas, lists Uber and Lyft collisions among the case types it takes, along with pedestrian and drunk driver cases. Those three categories describe a restaurant district on a weekend night more accurately than anyone in the restaurant business would like to admit.
None of that is an argument for driving. The reason to leave the car at home has not changed and neither has the wine list. It is an argument for treating a crash you were a passenger in as its own situation, with its own paperwork, rather than something the driver will sort out on your behalf while you wait to hear from the app.