# No surges for days. Am I missing something?



## AVLien (Mar 4, 2017)

I have not seen a single surge on my map for days. A few weeks ago I could almost set my watch by them. (I was on vacation for a week & change, so not online.) It's quite strange. 

Also (probably unrelated) I haven't been seeing bonuses or hourly guarantees for even a few weeks before I was out of town. Is everyone boycotting Uber again? This is kind of my only gig at the moment & since Lyft's unbelievable background check turned up dropped charges & things I had long since forgotten about, that's not an option for me either.

This kind of blows. Any thoughts?


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## Tampa Sam (Apr 7, 2017)

I was thinking the same thing. Don't know what happened. I've seen one surge at the beach and it was for five minutes.


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## PoulTrend (Apr 7, 2017)

Unfortunately Uber has over saturated the market in all cities. Expect less and less surges moving forward. Soon as a result I expect many drivers to leave or stop driving.


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## Shangsta (Aug 15, 2016)

Get a surge app. You get notifications when surge happens and can start predicting them and being in the right place at the right time


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## mrpjfresh (Aug 16, 2016)

I work in the same market and personally believe the surge was actually broken for a little over a week. It probably was related to an app update but who knows. Asheville is a small market, but it is not _that_ small.

For example, a few Saturdays ago, I was literally getting stacked pings a _minute_ or so into trips for like 2-3 hrs. I thought to myself, " Wow, I must be killing it" yet when I went offline to check, not a single surge ride. I waited offline to see if a surge would appear and... nothing. To test demand, I went online and was immediately pinged. I just went back offline and found something else to do. As a follow up, local pax were asking why it had been so hard to find an Uber the prior weekend.

Check out another thread in the surge forum. The OP did some awesome legwork here and it was pretty informative. It shows that surges can be broken; in his case, it was capped. It makes sense now in retrospect.

https://uberpeople.net/threads/uber-has-capped-the-surge-in-my-city.152064/


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## RiderGuy (Dec 8, 2016)

Uber changed their surge algorithm a few weeks ago. I have a custom app (software dev here) that monitors rider wait times. What used to cause a surge (i.e, 10-15 min wait times on the weekends) causes little to no surge now. Even when the bars close, the surge is a fraction of what it used to be, yet passenger wait times are high.

The only way this will bite them in the ass is if drivers refuse to work for sub-minimum wage rates (the standard rate) when expenses are accounted for.


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## AVLien (Mar 4, 2017)

Shangsta said:


> Get a surge app


I was using SurgeChaser. The thing is, SurgeChaser was telling me there were surges when there weren't any on the map at all (let alone where my pins were dropped).

I'm actually working on a way to digest the notifications & automatically chart them in Excel (or equivalent).

The whole thing is useless if the apps feed me spurious data though. I started another thread in my local (Asheville, NC) forum just to "compare notes" (screenshots of surge maps) in hopes we could determine if different ants are seeing different surges.

This makes more sense per recent news about "greyballing" & whatnot. If the system can show investigators spurious ants, then surely it is capable of showing us different things. Right?

Another thing I noticed the other night was a really bad lag on the map. I was half way across town & my position was still at my last drop off. This applied to the surge as well, because I scooped up 2 pax in a giant red blob but no multiplier was applied.

I doubt that this would explain the lack of surges, but it doesn't help either. I'm a developer, who is currently learning node.JS (which Uber runs on), so I know it has limitations but not many. Certainly a company with Uber's resources shouldn't be displaying 10-minute-old data. The whole system would break down.


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## Jagent (Jan 29, 2017)

What if pax are paying surges, but they are hidden from the drivers and we are paid base? Uber would do that.


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## Adieu (Feb 21, 2016)

Dropped charges??? Wth?

Innocent until CONVICTED guilty


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## Lee239 (Mar 24, 2017)

I've seen 2 fake surges this week. I've driven for a month and have never gotten a surge ride. As I drove into the surge it disappeared and I only got one scam ride that i had to cancel out of it. So no more driving into a surge for me, it won't even get me a regular fare ride. 

There are so many drivers it's all about luck if you can do a few rides a day in my area.


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## Jagent (Jan 29, 2017)

Lee239 said:


> I've seen 2 fake surges this week. I've driven for a month and have never gotten a surge ride. As I drove into the surge it disappeared and I only got one scam ride that i had to cancel out of it. So no more driving into a surge for me, it won't even get me a regular fare ride.
> 
> There are so many drivers it's all about luck if you can do a few rides a day in my area.


Quit driving into surges while you're logged in. You're killing the surge.


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## Lee239 (Mar 24, 2017)

Jagent said:


> Quit driving into surges while you're logged in. You're killing the surge.


So you go offline and drive into ti and then log on?

and how does one person kill the surge, they are fake surges to get people in a certain area, if they were real I would get a ping when I was a mile away for a ride.


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