Ground Transportation Should Be a Governed Enterprise Function

Ground transportation is operationally critical for enterprises, yet it remains “structurally under-owned and managed as a convenience rather than governed as a source of risk,” as Urbanride’s Director of Elite Client Services Jaime Starcheski wrote earlier this week.

Writing for Insurance Edge, Jaime unpacked enterprise reliance on consumer ride-hailing platforms, where insurance is commonly assumed to transfer risk but rarely provides clear ownership.

The underlying issue extends beyond insurance. For most organizations, visibility risk is discussed in terms of information security, communications controls, and digital exposure. Ground transportation belongs squarely in this same category: it’s one of the few settings where executives, assistants, and teams discuss sensitive information in public space.

In unmanaged transportation environments, conversations pertaining to deals, financials, personnel, and strategy occur outside the protections typically associated with NDAs or enterprise-level MSAs, in vehicles operated by unvetted actors. The result is a breakdown in the chain of custody for information: conversations may be overheard, and lost hardware enters recovery processes designed for the general public, not for high-value corporate assets.

The problem is not that something goes wrong on every trip, but that when it does, there is no enterprise framework governing who owns the exposure. From a risk perspective, this is an information-security issue in motion – one that sits outside traditional ownership structures.

Security risk is often framed around destinations, venues, and access control. Ground transportation is treated as neutral space in between, but in reality, it’s one of the most susceptible environments an executive enters.

Consumer ride-hailing platforms rely on decentralized driver pools, offering enterprises little visibility into their drivers, vetting standards, or escalation protocols. There is no unified command structure and no predefined path for intervention when something deviates from plan.

For high-profile executives or regulated industries, this creates a duty-of-care gap. Route deviations, unsafe areas, confrontations, or breakdowns are managed reactively rather than through predetermined protocols. When incidents occur, organizations are left improvising responses where governance should already be in place. This stands in stark contrast to how enterprises manage other forms of physical risk.

Taken together, the risks spanning insurance, visibility, and security share a common root cause: ownership.

Boards routinely review cybersecurity posture, financial controls, and supply-chain resilience. These risks are monitored and stress-tested on a regular basis and escalated when thresholds are breached. By contrast, risk related to how executives, employees, and guests move on the ground is rarely examined at all – an omission that reflects outdated assumptions about where enterprise risk resides.

Ground transportation is no longer a tactical detail. It’s an operational dependency and cannot be treated as incidental. If you represent an organization reassessing how it governs ground transportation, we’d welcome the opportunity to connect.