Ride sharing services like Uber and Lyft and hotel-like app Airbnb have certainly made the idea of rating transactions and experiences - for both users and providers - a mainstream comcept.

But now Uber Freight, which hopes to match shippers and truckers in a similar way to how it managers ride services, is branching into an interesting area by developing an app for carriers to rate pick-up and drop off facilities.

Of course, delays, lousy facilties, rude treatment and more have generate anecdotal complaints by truckers for decades. More recently, mandatory electronic data loggers will eventually generate data on dwell times loading and unloading, but that is just one aspect of a facility's attactiveness, and it's not clear how carriers will expose that data.

So along comes Uber Freight, which says it will allow truck drivers to rate facilties as part of its app - and truckers can consider those rating before they decide whether to accept a given load.

A look at this app functionality is shown in the graphic below from Uber.

Uber says drivers have seven days after a pickup or delivery to rate a facility. Uber Freight analyzes comments and works with the shipper to determine what changes would improve its rating.

“Shippers are able to receive real information right from the source about what happened at that facility and what’s going on,” said Kate Kaufman, Uber Freight operations director.

The shippers, however, cannot respond to specific comments.

The bottom line: if you are a facility that doesn't treat carriers very well, in a period of a severe driver shortage, there won't be anywhere left to hide

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