The Gig Economy

ScORSA Scoping Review: Well-Being, Health, and Road Safety in On-Demand Delivery Work

The past decade has seen platform-based delivery and ride-hailing services become a normal part of everyday life. Food arrives in minutes; private hire vehicles appear at the tap of an app. But as these services have expanded, so too has a less visible shift: public roads are increasingly workplaces, used intensively by self-employed drivers and riders whose earnings depend on speed, availability, and constant responsiveness. A new ScORSA-commissioned scoping review by Dr. Karen Gregory (University of Edinburgh) and Boyan Karabaliev (Workers Observatory) argues that road safety and occupational health frameworks have not kept up with this reality - leaving gig workers under-protected, under-counted, and exposed to risks that are structurally produced by the organisation of platform work.

A core problem identified by the review is misrecognition. Gig workers are often treated as ordinary road users rather than workers operating under occupational exposure. In UK road collision datasets, incidents involving delivery riders and ride-hailing drivers are typically recorded as traffic collisions, not workplace accidents. Employment status and platform involvement are rarely captured, meaning the scale and nature of work-related harm remains obscured. This matters because driving and riding for work account for a substantial share of serious road outcomes - yet the systems designed to prevent workplace harm frequently do not “see” platform work as work.

The regulatory gap is closely connected to the platform business model. Most gig workers in the UK are classified as self-employed contractors who use their own vehicles and have little visible connection to an employer. Platforms commonly provide minimal formal training, limited safety oversight, and few structured occupational health and safety (OHS) systems. Workers are expected to self-manage risk - weather, fatigue, dangerous traffic, equipment adequacy, hostile encounters - often without the protections that standard employment arrangements would typically entail.

The review synthesises evidence across delivery cycling (including e-bikes), motorcycles and mopeds, and ride-hailing. Across these modes, the literature consistently links platform-mediated work with elevated injury risk, fatigue, and psychosocial harm, especially among young and precariously employed riders. While individual factors such as age and experience play a role, the review stresses that the dominant drivers of harm are upstream: work design, algorithmic management, and economic insecurity.

A distinctive contribution of the review is its focus on algorithmic management as a risk-producing system. Piece-rate pay - payment per delivery or trip - combined with unpaid waiting time incentivises workers to stay constantly available and complete tasks rapidly. Real-time monitoring, dynamic incentives, customer ratings, and penalties for late deliveries can push workers toward unsafe practices: speeding, red-light violations, skipping breaks, riding or driving while fatigued, and using mobile phones in motion to accept jobs or follow app instructions. Crucially, these behaviours are widely described in the literature not as individual deviance, but as rational adaptations to the pressures built into the platform model.

Fatigue emerges as a major cross-cutting hazard. Workers often increase hours to compensate for low or unpredictable earnings, leading to cumulative sleep deprivation and physical exhaustion. Research cited in the review links fatigue and sleepiness to impaired performance and increased crash risk. Yet “rest” interventions can miss the point if low pay and unstable demand continue to drive overwork. Even some platform-led fatigue monitoring tools may worsen stress when they function primarily as surveillance rather than as genuinely health-centred protections.

The review also highlights the substantial psychological and social toll of platform road work. Opaque algorithmic decision-making, constant performance monitoring, income insecurity, and data surveillance contribute to chronic stress and anxiety. Burnout and emotional exhaustion are reported as common among delivery riders operating under intense time pressure with limited support. Many workers juggle multiple jobs, compounding fatigue and reducing recovery time. Alongside these pressures are risks that receive even less public attention: violence, assault, harassment, and theft, particularly for workers operating alone in public space with unclear reporting mechanisms and limited post-incident support.

Taken together, the report argues that gig workers constitute a growing category of vulnerable road user - highly exposed due to long hours and high-mileage urban conditions, but poorly protected by safety regulation and poorly represented in official statistics. This under-recognition undermines national road safety ambitions, including Transport Scotland’s commitment in the Road Safety Framework 2030 to eliminate deaths while driving or riding for work. If work-related road risk continues to be treated mainly as an issue of individual behaviour, the review suggests, prevention strategies will keep missing the structural causes of harm.

From this evidence base, ScORSA and RoSPA advance a clear position: everyone who uses the road for work should be able to get home safely, and this requires recognising the road as a workplace. The review’s practical priority areas focus on change that can be pursued even amid broader debates about employment classification. First, it calls for improved data and risk visibility - collision reporting that captures whether journeys were for platform-mediated work, and local/national monitoring hubs to identify trends and high-risk zones. Second, it supports safer streets and infrastructure designed with the realities of delivery work in mind, including speed differentials, loading and stopping needs, and the integration of micromobility and last-mile delivery into active travel planning. Third, it encourages minimum expectations on training, equipment, insurance, and post-incident support, recognising that many workers currently receive little formal induction or protective provision. Finally, it argues for platform accountability and engagement: because platforms shape risk through incentives, task allocation, and interface design, they should assess and mitigate hazards arising from their systems and provide transparent, worker-centred safety processes.

The ScORSA scoping review delivers a blunt message: platform work has reorganised risk on public roads, but policy and data systems have not adapted. If the fastest-growing group of occupational road users remains invisible within road safety and OHS frameworks, preventable harm will continue. The route to safer roads, the report suggests, runs not only through enforcement and education, but through systems-level reform that treats work-related road risk as shared responsibility - designed into the job, not left to the individual to absorb.

The paper can be read here ScORSA Scoping Review - The Gig Economy by RoSPA