Before the Outside Lands festival was even over, numerous articles started popping up on sites like ValleyWag, SF Weekly and SFist about ridiculously high fares due to Uber’s surge pricing. Each night after the event let out surge pricing got up to 5 times the normal rate. Online, everybody freaked out over a couple pics of some pretty high fares. Uber was portrayed as the bad guy, ripping off decent festivalgoers that just wanted to get home.
Yeah, it’s easy to hate on Uber. And plenty of commenters lambasted the spoiled passengers who couldn’t be bothered to take public transportation. Or walk. Or ride a bike. Though if they’d seen the mobs around the bus stops on Geary, they might have held back on some of that criticism. Those poor saps weren’t going anywhere anytime soon. Still, is it better to be a sucker? No. But another factor that’s being overlooked in all this brouhaha is that these high fares were not just the direct result of surge pricing. They are also a consequence of drivers coming into the city to work event and not knowing how to navigate the streets.
I know that drivers are supposed to stick up for fellow drivers, but if fares are surging even two times the normal rate, do you want somebody behind the wheel who knows how to get you where you’re going in the most efficient, least expensive way possible or a driver who would be completely lost without Waze or Google Maps?
I don’t deny that navigation apps can be useful. But they can only help so much during major traffic jams. Even an app like Waze that updates itself in real time with user input is dependent on the users’ familiarity with the streets they are driving. You don’t need an app to tell you traffic sucks when you can just look outside your window. There are many options when driving through a city. Not just the fastest and the shortest. Experienced drivers know alternate routes and how to avoid traffic from driving the streets regularly.
I had several passengers over the weekend tell me they’d gotten the runaround from out-of-town drivers. One guy told me his previous driver didn’t even know how to get to Golden Gate Park! He tried to direct her but she insisted on using navigation, so they had to find an address that corresponded with the park. Locals know when their drivers are lost, but what about all those thousands of passengers who flew into San Francisco for Outside Lands? They had no clue where they were going and were just as disoriented as their drivers.
In the example above, a driver used the Great Hwy and Sloat to get from the Richmond to Castro/Upper Market. That driver turned a four mile ride into eleven miles. Even if they were trying to avoid traffic, there’s no reason to go that far out of your way. Personally, I’d go through Laurel Heights, Nopa or Anza Vista. I drove all over those areas during Outside Lands and the streets were not that congested. Sure, there are more stop signs on side streets. But is it better to stop and drive or stop and stop and go a few feet then stop again, over and over, all the way out of the Richmond District? Geary, Lincoln, Fulton and the other major boulevards were a sea of red lights. During an event of this caliber, avoiding the major streets and using alternate routes is a no-brainer. But, hey, if drivers are in the city just to squeeze as much out of price surging as possible, then why bother making the rides shorter?
While those drivers taking home hundreds of dollars from this event should be ashamed of themselves if those fares were jacked up due to their own ineptitude as a driver, another important part of the story left out of these articles about price surging is that these inflated fares during Outside Lands were from rides in UberBlack towncars or UberXL SUVs.
Face it: if you want to feel money, you have to pay the price.
But many UberX drivers saw fares in the $90 range. From what I witnessed during the event, these drivers must have been picking up passengers deep in the mess of traffic, during the highest surges. And like UberBlack and UberXL users, those passengers deserve to pay more because they know they’re requesting a car at the worst possible moment. The app tells them as much. It’s stupid for them to complain. The savvy rideshare users were the ones who walked out of the congestion, waited for the surge to go down, or just used Lyft, whose Prime Time never seemed to go past 75%.
I had one group of passengers walk towards me as I drove to their location, making it easier to pick them up without getting too caught up in the traffic near the festival entrance/exit, where the madness had to have been nuts. I have no idea what it was like there because I never ventured close enough. I’m sure it was a clusterfuck of cabs, towncars, Uber sedans and mustachioed Lyft cars. Only inexperienced and greedy drivers would attempt to participate in a feeding frenzy like that.
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