How I no longer pay Uber's surge rates | Hacker News Reader

How I no longer pay Uber's surge rates

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37 pointsarielm39 comments

Here is a better insight: don't user Uber. They have seriously become one of the most distasteful companies to give money to. Try Flywheel in SF, it is virtually identical to the Uber app, the drivers are way better, the app doesn't mislead you about driver location, there is no surge pricing, the waits are (in general) less, and drivers are just as polite :)

Wait what was that last part? Yes it is true. When I first moved to SF 4 years ago taxi drivers were unbelievably rude but the one good thing Uber has done is change the bar for customer service for the better and make rating drivers in an app a standard. The result is that there is no reason to use Uber in SF. I don't know the details of other cities but I know other major areas like NYC have similar services.

"But $Company_X is evil!" is about as bad as "Ugh I hate paywalls" in terms of distracting meta-commentary on links.

Preaching to the choir.

Every of those pseudo-sharing company is distasteful.

Sharing should work without for-profits.

Infrastructure 'aint just gonna build itself.

I agree. I also wouldn't really call them sharing... Who's sharing? We're paying for a service. Nothing else.

I haven't tried Flywheel, but I ditched Uber a long time ago and switched to Lyft. How does Flywheel compare?

I've had 2 taxi drivers steal my credit card info in the past 2 years and taxis are still more expensive than Uber or Lyft, even through Flywheel.

Polite is great and all, but I've never had a Lyft driver steal my credit card info.

Every experience I've had with Flywheel in SF has been terrible (sample size: 4). Each time the taxi has been slow to arrive, up to twice as expensive, taken bizarre routes and the drivers were just as rude as every other taxi.

I'd rather take the bus than give Flywheel my money to be honest.

This has not been my experience at all. Surges usually last between 10 and 30 minutes with an average closer to 30.

The only thing I agree about with the author of the article is that the surge is highly predictable if you use some common sense: in the morning, if the weather has just turned worse, from 6.05 to 6.15 pm when people are leaving offices, etc

Are you using the 'Notify Me' feature?

I am - that's how I know how long the surges lasted: by how long I had to wait for the 'surge ended' notification.

This also means that all my surge time estimates are underestimating the actual length, since I've only started measuring while the surge has been active for a period of time.

Uber personalizes the wait time base on how much an user had spent in the past - A bit like airline frequent flyer program?

I guess they have enough data after my 100+ trips with Uber.

Exactly. This schmuck is gonna pay whatever our price is.

The SurgeProtector app is also great for those times when you could walk a few blocks and avoid surge pricing.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/surgeprotector/id925613132?m...

I've noticed that if you stare at the app long enough you can see the surge rate fluctuate also.

Did anyone here go to the secret uber party a few weeks ago?

I did and boy was that lame. It was marketing genius but it was super lame: at 9pm sharp, open the app and if you see a party icon on the type selection slider, click it and request a car.

You get into a lottery and if your one of the lucky 100 winners your driver will take you to a secret uber party with a DJ!

I won the lottery to get a slot - but that took 40 minutes of clicking on two open uber apps.

So we get in the uber and they take us to Harlot in SF. But they charge you for the ride there.

Then you get in, after they check your uber receipt to prove you actually got the party uber slot, and they give you a wristband.

Then there was some shitty radio station playing for the first 20 minutes, and uber sold this as if you were coming to some uber corporate event!

Nope it was just a regular night at harlot, and their over priced drinks. Drinks were $15 each and I swear they swapped out the grey goose vodka and put gilbeys in the grey goose bottle.

The DJ Arty came on and was mediocre. He played pieces too quickly (every time the music was getting the crowd dancing and moving he'd switch and go to a break down which killed all dancing)

So after about an hour and a half, we decided to leave.

You would have thought uber would have arranged a "take me home from the secret uber party you brought me to by way of a lottery ride that I still had to pay for"

Nope.

So we then had to stand in front of harlot tapping request an uber home. And had to wait just like normal..

It was literally the lamest "sponsored" event I've ever been to.

And the worst part is that the whole thing was a douchey ploy for their data teams to mine a bunch of data on the behavior of users when given an opportunity to go to some "event"... That's all fine, but make it a good experience at least. It was shamefully bad.

A few people commenting this has not been their experience. It has been my experience in the NYC area. It could be a NYC thing. We have an abundance of taxi's so it very well could mean enough people just drop Uber and grab a cab instead. This would quickly lower the demand in an area.

It might also have to do with the density dynamics of NYC. Ubers are constantly going into and out of designated areas that surge pricing zones. It won't take long for a few Ubers to roll into the zone where there is a surge.

Things work differently in NYC due to the density and relative small area of Manhattan.

That's certainly possible. I doubt that supply fluctuates that much for the price to change that quickly though.

Maybe Uber lowers the trigger for surge during specific times of the day where they know the supply does fluctuate.

My experience is from rides at different hour of the day, but those could have all been coincidences.

I don't think Uber is doing this to add to their bottom line - it isn't really enough money to make a difference to them. Instead, they do surge pricing because it's a better experience than telling people there are no cabs available. It prevents their best customers from ever needing an alternative to Uber.

I don't know if that's their way of saying "no", I think if anything it's their way of increasing the value of a ride.

In a dense city like NYC however, where there are a ton of alternatives, I think it's more clever than just reallocation resources.

I live in St. Louis and recently took a ride with Uber. Our driver basically gave us the exact same information. He told us that if we ever see surge pricing, to wait ~10 minutes and the rates will be back down to normal again. Its interesting to see that this is being seen from the rider's side as well.

Isn't this great, load balancing on the demand side? You get fast rides with a smaller amount of cars.

If you wait long enough, it'll be just like you'd called Laclede in the first place :)

This blog post is patently false. If Uber wanted to rip the riders off, or maximize revenues, they wouldn't have dropped UberX prices in every city to below taxi rates, and they didn't have to provide the ability to wait for surge to finish. By using the button, they are doing exactly what Uber wants, which is time-shift the demand to another point where there's enough supply to properly service the customer. It's not a trick or some secret discovery, it's exactly the point of the service!

Are you suggesting that Uber is doing these things out of the goodness of their hearts? Does that sound like the way a successful business acts?

Exercise: can you think of explanations for why they would do these things that would help to maximize their revenue in the long run? I'll give you a hint: the article gives an explanation for one of them, which you haven't compellingly refuted.

It's definitely possible that this has nothing to do with revenue and everything to do with allocating limited resources better. Either way, knowing this means I don't have to pay surge pricing ;)

> nothing to do with revenue and everything to do with allocating limited resources better

I'm not sure how you can separate those.

Its my understanding that "surge" is also linked to number of open Uber apps - and not necessarily the number of people actually requesting a ride. Can anyone confirm this?

My bet: The features not been fully completed, just roughed out.

I think this happened early when Uber announced pool (the day before lyft), for a short while no-one shared and you just got a cheaper ride (lyft had actual sharing from launch).

Obviously it was worth Uber fleshing out sharing asap, but maybe it just isn't with surge-notify. If hardly anyone is taking advantage of it... just having a delay of a few minutes may mean that most users impatiently go with the surge.

the lyft app requires less permissions and they don't surge prices like that.

also you get lots of promotions, like Mondays 50% ofg

I can confirm this has happened to me multiple times. Interestingly enough, sometimes I've seen it surge to 2.5x, so I tapped notify me... checked again after a minute, still 2.5x, but after another minute it dropped to 2.0x.

Anecdotally this has not been my experience. Would love to see more data points in various geos at different degrees of surge. That said, this is reason enough to press notify every time now just in case.

I haven't had much success with the "Notify" button in the past, even with 1 hr lead time.

I was told by an Uber driver recently, that surge rates appear, when demand outgrows supply in certain area. So those, who will to pay more, will receive their car much faster. No big deal (-:

That's the entire premise. It's econ101.

Uber doesn't give drivers the ability to seek out surge areas of their city..?

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