Safety you can check, not just trust.
Ride PINs, trip sharing, trusted contacts, SOS and verified driver records support every trip.
Every request passes a gate first
Most of the safety work happens before you ever see a car. A driver who fails any one of these checks is not offered your trip, and the checks are applied again after the driver has been picked, not just when the list was drawn up.
- A licence that has not expired
- The licence number, its expiry date and a photograph of it are taken at application. A driver whose licence has passed its expiry date stops receiving trips.
- Insurance and roadworthiness that are still valid
- Both documents are held against the vehicle with their expiry dates. When one lapses, the document is marked expired, the vehicle is taken out of service and the driver is told why.
- An account a person approved
- Driver applications are reviewed by the Topsy team rather than approved automatically. Until an account is verified, it cannot be matched with a rider.
- Nobody you have been separated from
- If a rider and a driver have been blocked from each other after an incident, the pair is never matched again. A driver is also prevented from being matched with their own rider account, by account and by phone number.
- One job at a time
- A driver already on a trip, or already holding a pending request, is not offered another. The car coming to you is coming to you.
Four moments where something checks in
-
When you book
A four-digit PIN is generated for that trip and shown in your app. At the same time, any trusted contact you have set to receive your trips is queued to be texted the tracking link.
-
At pickup
You read the PIN out and the driver enters it. The comparison is done in a way that cannot be probed digit by digit, and a trip with no PIN can never be started. Five wrong entries lock the attempt for fifteen minutes.
-
While you are moving
The route you are actually taking is compared against the route that was planned, and the trip's elapsed time against its estimate. Anything unusual raises an event rather than waiting for someone to complain.
-
When the trip ends
The chat between you and your driver closes with the trip, so a conversation that existed for one journey does not stay open afterwards. Ratings and support are still available on the completed trip.
A link that shows enough, and stops
- The link carries the trip status, the driver's name and photo, the vehicle and its plate, and where the car is
- It carries nothing else about you, your account or your history
- It stops working twelve hours after it is created
- It stops working the moment the trip is completed or cancelled
- Up to three trusted contacts can be saved, and any of them can be set to receive the link automatically
A trip you share is a trip somebody else can watch arrive. It is not a standing permission to follow you, which is why the link expires on its own rather than waiting for you to remember it.
Three things a trip is measured against
- Route deviation
- The car's position is compared against the planned route. Drift beyond the distance Topsy allows raises a route deviation event on that trip.
- An unusual stop
- A trip that is supposed to be moving but has stayed in one place for longer than Topsy allows raises a stop event. Traffic looks different from a stop, because a stopped car does not drift.
- Trip overrun
- Every trip is quoted with an estimated duration. Running well past it raises an overrun event, so a journey that has taken far too long is noticed by the system rather than only by the person in it.
- What an event does next
- Each one opens an incident on the Topsy operations board and pushes it to the team live, without anyone refreshing a page. Topsy has a dedicated safety role for the people who work that board.
SOS goes to people, not to a queue
Pressing SOS in the app sends an alert carrying your location. Every trusted contact you have saved is texted, and whether each message was accepted by the network is recorded per contact rather than assumed.
The same alert opens an incident at critical severity on the Topsy operations board. From there it is acknowledged, assigned, escalated or resolved, and every one of those actions is written to an audit record.
- Trusted contacts
- Up to three, each with a name, a number and how they are related to you.
- Alert delivery
- Tracked per contact, and logged with the number masked rather than in full.
- Incident states
- Open, acknowledged, investigating, resolved. Nothing skips straight to closed.
- Accident evidence
- Held privately and only ever served through a signed link that expires.
- Support tickets
- A ticket raised under Safety is opened at urgent priority, not normal.
What people ask
What is the ride PIN for?
It confirms that the car in front of you is the car assigned to your trip. The driver cannot start the trip without it, so the wrong car cannot begin a journey against your booking.
Are trips recorded?
No. Topsy does not record rides or in-app calls, and recording is not something that can be switched on through a setting. It is absent from how the calling service is built.
Can anyone see where drivers are on the public map?
The public map deliberately shows no driver name, no identity and no number plate to anonymous visitors, and it rounds positions rather than pinpointing them. Publishing a live map of identifiable drivers would be a safety problem in itself.
What happens after I report a driver?
An incident is opened and worked through acknowledged, investigating and resolved, with every action recorded. Where it is warranted, you and that driver can be blocked from ever being matched again.
Do couriers have the same checks?
Delivery work runs on the same driver application, the same document review and the same handover codes. A parcel handover needs a code in the same way a ride pickup does.
Something happened. Where do I start?
Raise a support ticket and choose Safety as the topic. It is opened at urgent priority and enters the same queue the Topsy team works from. If you are in immediate danger, contact the emergency services first.
Set your trusted contacts today.
Saving them once means they can be told a trip has started without you having to think about it at the time.