The Uber X car, the most cost effective ride Uber offers outside of the Uber TAXI, the Uber BLACK, the Uber SUV and the Uber LUX. (Photo : Uber)
The Christmas holiday season is upon us, and with that, getting a ride from Uber is going to be more expensive at times than it is now. This is due to what the company calls "surge ricing," so how to beat it?
Uber increases the cost of a ride whenever demand is very high. This usually happens a lot around traditional holidays, and there's nothing much consumers could have done about it until now, at least.
Three researchers from the "Northeastern University" wrote an interesting computer script that created 43 virtual Uber customers, each requesting rides from various locations in San Francisco and "New York City." The request is repeatedly done in order to kick start the sure pricing process.
Now, based on the location and pricing of cars Uber offered these 43 virtual users, the researchers were able to find out how surge pricing works, and ultimately, how to combat it.
According to the researchers via their study, when prices rise, the number of cars in the area where this is happening, does not go up by much, despite Uber claiming otherwise. Instead, the demand for cars take a plunge, so why the hike in prices if such is the case?
Uber denied these claims, telling ProPublica that its own data shows a rise in the number of cars is the reason for the attraction of a higher price.
Interestingly enough, the researchers point out that prices in the Uber app are updated at every 5 minutes, and that Uber manually sets the pricing for fixed area. So the researchers are saying, in order to beat the surge price system, consumers must attempt to figure out the nearest adjacent pricing area, then change their location inside the Uber app to get a car from that area.
The researchers claim that going this route would likely cause Uber to offer consumer cheaper prices.
It is not yet certain how real this study is, but it wouldn't hurt to try.
