Ridesharing

SF Outside Lands: Uber Pricing Surge and Ride Sharing for Free

4-8-Outside-LandsLast weekend at the San Francisco music festival Outside Lands fans were hit with huge price tags on their typically cheap and convenient peer to peer car service rides home. With public transit completely full and turning away passengers, I enjoyed an impromptu experience in free ride sharing as I drove a car full of concert goers across town.

This festival, which takes place in Golden Gate Park, always jams up public transportation in a part of the city where there is little public parking and few taxis can be found. People reported waiting hours at bus stops while full busses drove by without stopping. Many concert goers trying to get home turned to peer to peer ride services, which are quite popular in this city. But  the two most popular of these companies, Uber and Lift, operate on a demand-based pricing system; when there is particularly high demand for cars prices go up. And apparently extremely high demand means extremely high prices.

Outside Lands Music & Arts Festival 2009 - Golden Gate Park, San FranciscoKnowing from experience how hard it is to get home from this festival, I offered to pick up my wife on Sunday evening. I arrived to find the streets filled with thousands of concert goers looking for a way home. Outside Lands tried to help the situation by offering a ride sharing tool, Outside Rides, on the concert phone app. (We had the inside track on this app because it was the product of a hackathon victory by some students in my wife’s class.) With a completely empty back seat in our car, we decided to try offering up the rides. Unfortunately T-Mobile couldn’t handle all the phone traffic and the app wouldn’t load.

Not wanting to waste the empty space in our car, we resorted to the old fashioned technique: yelling out the window. As we drove past throngs of people walking along the sidewalk (and in the street) we decided the safest and quickest option was to pull up to one of the overflowing bus stops and offer up a ride. We quickly had four very thankful women pile in. They told us that the night before they had waited an hour at a bus stop before giving up and paying $160 for an Uber car to take them home (a ride that would typically cost less than $20).

While writing this I went into my Uber and Lyft apps to check the typical pricing. Just before 9am both reported “surge pricing” based on higher demand and asked me to agree to the 2x (Uber) or 25% (Lyft) increase before requesting my ride. Neither offers me the chance to calculate the cost of the ride before requesting a car, so I don’t doubt that many people were slightly drunk (or more than slightly) and got into cars without thinking through the price they were likely to pay.

Overall I’m a fan of peer to peer transportation, including taxi services like Uber and Lyft, which can drive down costs and provide transportation options in places where it is very hard to find a taxi. But in the “sharing economy” most peer to peer services are about making money. Riders beware.