A disturbing new study from two technology professors found Black rideshare passengers are three times more likely to have their ride canceled compared to white people.

American University information technology and analytics professor Chris Parker conducted the experiment in Washington D.C., using one account with different profiles to see whether drivers were discriminating against riders.

In recent months, platforms like Uber and Lyft have amended their policies due to an increasing number of discrimination incidents. They recently removed a rider's race and gender from their profiles, but incident rates remain high.

Working alongside Indiana University professor of operations and decision technologies Jorge Meija, Parker and his team ordered rides from the same intersection using rotating profiles with different races, genders and sexual orientations. They included rainbow filers on certain photos to indicate that a rider was LGBTQ or supported the LGBTQ community.

Each profile had a 4.8 rating but had different names. After 3,200 connections with drivers over the course of one month, they found the profiles with the names Keisha, Latoya, Rasheed and Jamal were routinely canceled on by drivers.

Drivers also were two times more likely to cancel the rides of those identifying as members of the LGBTQ community.

Their study, “When Transparency Fails: Bias and Financial Incentives in Ridesharing Platforms,” showed that drivers were still finding ways to discriminate against Black riders. There was no difference in cancellation rates between Black women and Black men. 

“By removing the ability to see information before the drivers accepted a ride request, the hope was that all of the bias we were observing would cease to exist,” Parker said in an interview with NBC news.

“But after the change was instituted, we suspected that there’s still the problem of some drivers not wanting to pick up certain passengers,” he added.

Ridesharing companies like Uber and Lyft have to do more to stop drivers from discriminating against Black riders, Parker said to NBC.

He suggested the companies institute a delay that would withhold a person's name until they were in the car. He also said the platforms should harshly penalize drivers who had been shown to repeatedly discriminate. 

This is nothing new for Black people who, for decades, have dealt with reticence from cab drivers. Taxi discrimination is so common that the inability to get a cab is now a running joke in Black communities across the country. 

Rideshare companies hailed themselves as an answer to this problem, touting their supposedly agnostic platforms and algorithms as "color-blind." 

But old practices die hard, and cab drivers have shown no signs of changing how they interact with Black customers. Disturbing incidents in Ubers and Lyfts involving racism are extremely common and continue to occur at an alarming rate. 

“There’s a lot of next-step actions platforms might consider to ensure a good outcome and that everybody has a safe, comfortable, noncombative ride,” Parker said.