Rideshare Liability and Proximate Cause: The Limits of Duty in TNC Litigation

For personal injury litigators, establishing a transportation network company’s (TNC) liability for an injured passenger requires proving both a breach of the standard of care and a direct, foreseeable causal link to the harm.

While the plaintiff’s bar continues to push for an expansion of rideshare liability—often arguing that tech platforms owe a heightened duty of care to vulnerable or impaired passengers—the judiciary remains cautious. A key challenge for practitioners is navigating the boundary between a foreseeable risk and an attenuated chain of events that breaks proximate causation.

A recent appellate decision, McGarry v. Uber Technologies Inc (2026), highlights this boundary, clarifying the outer limits of a rideshare company’s liability when a passenger prematurely exits a vehicle and suffers harm miles away.

Fact Pattern: Evaluating Attenuation in TNC Wrongful Death Claims

The dispute arose from a tragic incident involving an intoxicated college student who ordered an Uber ride alone. During the trip, the passenger became sick and vomited inside the vehicle.

The evidence established that the driver refused the passenger’s request to exit while still on the freeway. Instead, the driver exited the interstate and pulled over onto a side road. At that point, the passenger canceled the ride request through the application and exited the vehicle at a red light.

The passenger subsequently requested a second Uber ride. When the second driver arrived in the area, he observed her sitting on an embankment but did not successfully pick her up.

Less than thirty minutes later, and through unknown means, the passenger traveled approximately four miles away to a different freeway interchange. She wandered into the traffic lanes and was struck and killed by two vehicles.

The student’s mother filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Uber, alleging negligence, negligent training, and statutory violations. The plaintiff’s theory relied heavily on the inference that the first driver had forcibly ejected the impaired student into an unsafe environment after she became ill, setting the fatal sequence of events into motion.

The trial court granted summary judgment in favor of Uber, concluding that there was an insufficient causal link between the driver’s actions and the passenger’s death.

The Core Legal Issues: Scope of Risk vs. Public Policy in Tort Law

The primary issue on appeal was whether the passenger’s death on a freeway interchange miles away from where she was dropped off fell within the legally cognizable “scope of risk” created by Uber’s conduct.

To determine liability, the court evaluated the following frameworks:

1. Proximate Causation: Discharging Passengers in Safe vs. Hazardous Zones

The plaintiff argued that leaving an intoxicated passenger on a side road carries a general, foreseeable risk that they might wander into traffic. Therefore, being struck by vehicles should be considered within the general range of harm arising from the driver’s conduct.

The appellate court rejected this expansive view of proximate cause. It emphasized that because the driver did not allow the passenger to exit on the freeway—where the immediate risk of walking into high-speed traffic would be clear—dropping her off on a standard side road severed that immediate scope of risk.

The four-mile distance and the unknown sequence of events between the drop-off and the accident created an attenuation gap too wide to bridge without relying on sheer speculation.

2. Protecting Platforms From Indefinite Post-Ride Liability

A critical component of the court’s analysis centered on public policy considerations embedded within proximate cause.

The court noted that holding a rideshare company liable under these facts would effectively compel TNCs to act as an insurer for any subsequent harm suffered by a passenger who chooses to depart a ride anywhere other than their original destination.

The judiciary clarified that public policy does not support extending a company’s duty of care to guarantee a passenger’s safety indefinitely after they voluntarily terminate the ride and exit into a non-hazardous environment.

3. Defeating Defense Motions: The Evidentiary Bar for Intervening Negligence

The plaintiff also challenged the trial court’s rejection of the inference that the driver forced the student out of the vehicle.

The appellate court affirmed that discarding an unreasonable inference does not constitute an improper credibility finding at the summary judgment stage. Because the plaintiff’s narrative relied on a “speculative bridge” of what could have happened after the drop-off, it failed to create a genuine, triable issue of material fact.

Key Obstacles for Plaintiff Attorneys in Rideshare Litigation

For tort practitioners handling rideshare and carrier liability cases, this ruling underscores several evolving hurdles in gig-economy litigation:

• The Safe Discharge Threshold: While previous rulings have suggested that common carriers owe a duty to discharge passengers into a relatively safe space, this case defines the limits of that space. If a driver drops off a passenger in a standard pedestrian area (like a side street at a red light), the platform likely satisfies its immediate duty, even if the passenger is visibly impaired.
• Overcoming the Attenuation Defense: Proving proximate cause requires tight temporal and geographic proximity. When a client wanders or takes alternative transport away from the initial drop-off point, the defense will heavily leverage the attenuation doctrine to argue that subsequent decisions by the plaintiff constitute intervening, superseding causes.
• The High Bar for Intervening Negligence Theories: Attempting to build a liability chain based on what an impaired client might do or what third-party “bad actors” could have done after the rideshare ride ends is increasingly viewed by courts as a bridge too far. Litigators must anchor their theories to concrete, non-speculative evidence of immediate danger at the exact point of discharge.

Practical Takeaway: The Corporate Liability Shield in TNC Lawsuits

This ruling underscores the formidable shield of protection the judiciary continues to afford rideshare giants at the expense of passenger safety. By strictly applying the doctrine of proximate cause to an attenuated sequence of events, courts are essentially allowing platforms like Uber to shrug off any ongoing duty of care the moment a passenger steps out of the vehicle.

Even when a platform actively profits from transporting vulnerable, highly intoxicated individuals, it can completely escape responsibility for a tragic outcome if the final harm occurs a few miles or minutes down the road—leaving plaintiff attorneys with a massive hurdle in holding tech companies accountable for the real-world consequences of their operational models.