# Is Uber intentionally making the surge worse?



## EVDriver (19 d ago)

I've been driving Uber passengers for a while now, and I've seen this enough times to know its not a coincidence.

When there is surge and your driving towards the surge area, Uber pings you trips 10-20 minutes away with no surge.

Every single time its surging I will get pings "away" from the surge area. Of course, I ignore these unprofitable trips and eventually I might get a surge within 5 min away, but its never the first or second ping.

By programming this into the algorithm Uber keeps drivers out of the surge zone and makes the surge higher for the pax, which of course means higher revenue for uber.

If this is true and we can prove this, there may be potential for action by the ACCC


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## Borisdog (Feb 27, 2020)

EVDriver said:


> I've been driving for uBer for a while now, and I've seen this enough times to know its not a coincidence.
> 
> When there is surge and your driving towards the surge area, Uber pings you trips 10-20 minutes away with no surge.
> 
> ...


Exactly who are you driving for?

Yourself or Uber?


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## EVDriver (19 d ago)

Borisdog said:


> Exactly who are you driving for?
> 
> Yourself or Uber?


I work for myself. Always have and always will.


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## Rebug (28 d ago)

EVDriver said:


> I've been driving Uber passengers for a while now, and I've seen this enough times to know its not a coincidence.
> 
> When there is surge and your driving towards the surge area, Uber pings you trips 10-20 minutes away with no surge.
> 
> ...


It's a bit of stretch to say uber does this. I think it has something to do with ineffectiveness of algorithm and/or the nature of trip requests, which cannot be predicted with 100% accuracy. Uber does not have fixed-surge guarantee.

I have taken screenshots of similar Pool trips situated 15 mins away from surge areas. I think it is more consistent with an algorithm inefficiency; my guess is that Uber predicts to get many trips in a given area because of people movement in that area, timing, the lack of cars in that area, and other factors. But whether those people actually request trips or not is a different story. They may also employ mathematical models that uses immediate history, i.e. "change of rate of change" in requests to determine surge possibilities. These theories can fall through easily.

I think surge more works when you as a human can determine it based on on-site facts, for example there is a conference that ends at 4 pm away from CBD, no cars are typically there, they don't have bus transport, their accommodation is somewhere else, so there is a strong possibility of surge at around 4:15 pm. Similar applies to airport pickups.


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## Sleepo (Dec 1, 2017)

EVDriver said:


> I've been driving Uber passengers for a while now, and I've seen this enough times to know its not a coincidence.
> 
> When there is surge and your driving towards the surge area, Uber pings you trips 10-20 minutes away with no surge.
> 
> ...


It's fairly simple, when its surging, riders are not keen to actually book, (ie app open but not booking until price goes down, opening app creates demand) therefore when riders book outside the area its saying you are the closest car available, (the stupidity of this is that the outside the surge area should actually be the surge zone as there are no cars available close)


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## Nocountryforoldman (Oct 15, 2019)

The first couple of base rate ping are for those who with 85% above acceptance rate. Then some surge trips for those with under 85% drivers. Nothing wrong with this.


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## Senti-Ant (Jan 17, 2020)

Nocountryforoldman said:


> The first couple of base rate ping are for those who with 85% above acceptance rate. Then some surge trips for those with under 85% drivers. Nothing wrong with this.


An interesting theory.. So you think that FUber would actually punish the drivers with the higher AR, which is what I think we can all agree is desirable driver behaviour from their perspective... ?


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## Nocountryforoldman (Oct 15, 2019)

Senti-Ant said:


> An interesting theory.. So you think that FUber would actually punish the drivers with the higher AR, which is what I think we can all agree is desirable driver behaviour from their perspective... ?


Punish is a very strong word. This is a system both sides agree with. Uber never punish drivers with lower acceptance rate and awards drivers with higher one.


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## Senti-Ant (Jan 17, 2020)

Nocountryforoldman said:


> Punish is a very strong word. This is a system both sides agree with. Uber never punish drivers with lower acceptance rate and awards drivers with higher one.


Right, so your statement was actually referring to how the allocation of trips happens in practice based on driver acceptance patterns and not the way it works because of FUber's algorithmic order distribution?


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## Nocountryforoldman (Oct 15, 2019)

Senti-Ant said:


> Right, so your statement was actually referring to how the allocation of trips happens in practice based on driver acceptance patterns and not the way it works because of FUber's algorithmic order distribution?


It still works under Uber's algorithm but I guess base rate trips have priority to surge trips distribution. In a isolated high surge area some base rate trips from nearby those base rate trips have priority distribute to drivers inside surge zone. Drivers with 5% acceptance rate certainly rejected them meanwhile some of drivers with 85%+ maybe rejected 1 or 2 but can't afford rejected all of them. They finally would take the base rate trip or low surge trip. After rejected maybe more than 10 trips and drivers with 85%+ clear those base rate trips, drivers with 5% acceptance rate get the higher surge jobs.


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## Senti-Ant (Jan 17, 2020)

Nocountryforoldman said:


> It still works under Uber's algorithm but I guess base rate trips have priority to surge trips distribution. In a isolated high surge area some base rate trips from nearby those base rate trips have priority distribute to drivers inside surge zone. Drivers with 5% acceptance rate certainly rejected them meanwhile some of drivers with 85%+ maybe rejected 1 or 2 but can't afford rejected all of them. They finally would take the base rate trip or low surge trip. After rejected maybe more than 10 trips and drivers with 85%+ clear those base rate trips, drivers with 5% acceptance rate get the higher surge jobs.


Ok so its not (according to your theory) that the algorithm assigns a greater proportion of base rate trips to higher AR rated drivers then right? Either way its the best big picture view of it I've seen conveyed here that I suspect carries merit. In the same way that the laws of supply and demand govern the regular economy, the laws of driver acceptance or ignorance govern the general distribution of trips. Looks like they're already addressing it in their usual draconian way given the cancellation warning emails I've seen posted by some in here...


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