# surge zones - my theory



## hanging in there (Oct 1, 2014)

After my admittedly brief experience so far with Uber driving I'm starting to come up with this theory of how Uber surge zones really work, and it's not good news.

I know the common wisdom is to not chase surges, but it is really hard to resist the temptation to do so when the alternative is to:

1) wait an unknown amount of time for a non-surge fare where you happen to be hanging out after dropping off your last pax

2) waiting for perhaps an even much greater amount of time if you are setting yourselves up as XL only, or Select only, for example, since you are trying to avoid the non-surge "X" fares.

3) be pickier about cancelling fares due to them being non-surge fares, and thereby possibly affecting your unpublished cancellation rate using ACRO, since there seems to be some recent evidence that Uber is in fact tracking the ACRO cancels even though they are not reflected in the official cancellation rate.

4) Wait for a Lyft ping, but Lyft will not allow you to filter the calls for "Plus" only (their version of "XL"),
and they tend to require longer chases to get to the call in my experience. And I don't think that ACRO works at all with them anymore, all my ACRO's recently seem to be reflected directly my acceptance rate just like a non-accepted call.

Compared to the above 4 options for the "sit-and-wait" strategy, chasing doesn't seem to be that bad of an option, on the surface.

However, in my experience, quite often the surge rate reduces by half by the time I am half way there, and then the moment I cross over the border into the red zone it disappears entirely.

Or, the red zone stays put and I park myself in the middle of it, only to sit there for a long time, let's say a half hour, with no pings, then suddenly the surge disappears and I get a ping shortly after that for a non-surge fare.

So, my half-baked theories are as follows:

Uber uses red zones to entice drivers to chase their tails into the zone when they have whatever data that tells them that either they MIGHT need more drivers in the area, such as for a big event, or due to historical data predictions for that area for that time, or due to a sudden increase in trip requests IN A CERTAIN PART of that area (I'll explain this later). There may be little to no actual shortfall of requests to available drivers in that area but Uber can use the red zones as kind of an insurance policy to eliminate or reduce the surge rate as quickly as possible. The way they make it super-easy for a pax to wait out a surge and because of the redundant notifications they give pax on the surge rate and needing to confirm it or being able to press the "Notify me when the surge goes down" button, they are training the pax to more or less look at the surge rate as:

"Hey, unless you are really drunk and/or stupid, or really desperate for a ride right this minute, you don't REALLY have to pay this surge rate, just wait a few minutes for all the greedy lemming drivers to flood the area and then you can hire them for the normal cheap sucker rates once they are fooled into coming here and then feel trapped".

Because, once you chase a surge Unicorn and then it disappears (did you actually just imagine it? hehe),
then if you are like me, you just want to take any fare in that area just to kind of justify the chase effort, since you would feel even more stupid if you chased it and then wound up with nothing at all. And the last thing you feel like doing is leaving that area empty-handed and then chasing the next red zone only to repeat and possibly compound the pain of another empty promise. (And be sure and top off your gas tank after all that fruitless chasing!)

So, in other words, the red zones can and probably are being used by Uber as a way of perfectly distributing drivers evenly around the land as needed in order to minimize response times, and minimize or eliminate surge rates (to keep the pax happy and coming back), at absolutely no cost to Uber. It is genius.

Another observation I'd like to note on surge zones is that after watching them for awhile it is obvious that the zone borders themselves are canned borders, such as how governments divide cities, counties, and states. From a programming perspective it seems obvious to me that you can visualize a market, say the LA market, in Uber's software being represented by what looks like a large puzzle of interlocking irregular puzzle pieces. If anything is going on in any part of a particular puzzle piece that is creating a higher demand for rides, they light up the entire puzzle piece. That can be misleading to someone that thinks that the entire red zone is bristling with activity. A great example of that is if you have noticed that the times that Santa Monica is red, they also light up the surrounding ocean as red, apparently for Uberboats. When the Nocturnal rave was lighting up red in the San Bernardino area recently they lit up vast sections of high desert that most likely doesn't even have one person living there. (Maybe there was a high demand amongst a group of lazy coyotes or squirrels.) Because in that case they created a very big puzzle piece for their software map for that particular area that includes the San Manuel Pavilion area.

Let's say that there is a big street fair going on in Burbank, they will light up the whole canned puzzle piece surrounding that Burbank area as a red zone even though perhaps only the bottom left very small area of that puzzle piece, the area of the big street fair, actually has any demand at all. So if you cross over into the red zone border thinking "I made it! Wow, gimme one of dem thar 4.7 surge fares!", well I have bad news for you. If you crossed over into the red zone, say, on the top right side of that canned border, then you might be way too far away from the actual action to get any fares, let alone a juicy surge fare. You need to know what is actually going on, and exactly where, and not rely simply on the red zone cookie-cutter borders.

There is a silver lining, if you could see it as such. After the (fake?) surge disappears it will probably result in an immediate release of pent-up demand for rides, so if you are looking for an area to stay busy in at standard non-surge rates, then disappearing red zones could well be the map to your happiness.

Any thoughts?


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## Chisox1125 (Jun 30, 2015)

There was a surge in Tampa on Saturday night (two to be exact) that if you were in a stones throw from the venue you were making out like a bandit.


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## NachonCheeze (Sep 8, 2015)

Let me summarize....its a scam


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## Chisox1125 (Jun 30, 2015)

Scam huh?


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## Tixx (Aug 27, 2015)

I think they include the ocean/desert in the surge coz passengers drop their pins in the non-surge area close to them even when its in the damn ocean then once a driver is on the way they make contact with the correct address. Sneaky sneaky!


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## Chisox1125 (Jun 30, 2015)

Oh there was no escaping the night we had. The entire area was lit up with 7.9 surges across. Due to the fact that the deman was that high it was effecting areas outside the venue with surges in the 5-6s


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## NachonCheeze (Sep 8, 2015)

sigh....now i have to explain because Chisox1125 proved me wrong....My comment is to be viewed from a larger perspective than any one incident of when you actually get the surge rates. As MANY people have pointed out the surge comes and goes and if you chase the surge you more than likely will lose out.....yes there are occasions when it does work...geez, dont be so pedantic (word of the day).


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## Chisox1125 (Jun 30, 2015)

I get what your saying man, we're just still coming down from our high from the weekend. I think in a general basis it's all about being at the right place at the right time.


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## Joe Zip (Feb 20, 2016)

Uber wants surges so they can make a lot more money. By the time drivers move into the surge areas, they've already booked the passengers at surge rates. Then what happens - surge opens up in areas where the drivers left. 
In any case, when they lower rates and drivers drop out, the demand exceeds drivers and surges surge. Customers gets ripped off and Uber makes a LOT more money.
I can just imagine an executive meeting trying to figure out how to make more money. Obviously, paying drivers more brings in more drivers and eliminates surge fares - which means Uber makes less. So let's squeeze out drivers creating driver shortages and surges almost all the time greatly boosting money that Uber grabs. Customer rip off.


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## Phoenix666 (Mar 6, 2015)

hanging in there said:


> After my admittedly brief experience so far with Uber driving I'm starting to come up with this theory of how Uber surge zones really work, and it's not good news.
> 
> I know the common wisdom is to not chase surges, but it is really hard to resist the temptation to do so when the alternative is to:
> 
> ...


Certain places have the surge after the surge. So if you miss it park, go offline, wait for it to appear again.


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## Uberduberdoo (Oct 22, 2015)




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## whmmer (Feb 24, 2016)

hanging in there said:


> After my admittedly brief experience so far with Uber driving I'm starting to come up with this theory of how Uber surge zones really work, and it's not good news.
> 
> I know the common wisdom is to not chase surges, but it is really hard to resist the temptation to do so when the alternative is to:
> 
> ...


I agree. Though they say they want to bring drivers into the surge area, 90% of the time, chasing the surge is just a waste of gas.


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## IUberGR (Jan 2, 2016)

Tixx said:


> I think they include the ocean/desert in the surge coz passengers drop their pins in the non-surge area close to them even when its in the damn ocean then once a driver is on the way they make contact with the correct address. Sneaky sneaky!


That's s pickup I'm not making.


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## IUberGR (Jan 2, 2016)

Phoenix666 said:


> Certain places have the surge after the surge. So if you miss it park, go offline, wait for it to appear again.


Yes, this works.


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## cannonball7 (Feb 18, 2016)




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## nplyftcp (Mar 1, 2016)

I never chase a surge. The main reason is there's no guarantee. The second reason is the likeness of it remaining surged once I get there isn't very high either. The only time I've ever accepted surge fares(I mean this as in I received surge fare requests) are when I just happen to be in the area because that's where I was going or just dropped someone off around there.


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