Originally Posted by
carpediem22
I am a rather infrequent user of Uber/Lyft and have a question regarding a ride later this week.
I need to go to SFO airport from a somewhat remote East Bay location around 4 AM in the morning. Are these services likely to have 'Surge' pricing (e.g. due to there being fewer drivers at such hours)?
What do you mean by remote? Are you talking something like Pittsburg or something like Diablo Grande?
I live in the outskirts of Phoenix and I've never once seen surge in my area at any time of day. I'm very used to waiting 15-20 minutes for my car to show up. About 20% of the time I get a "no cars available" message. Depending on where you are I think this would be more likely than a surge.
On that note, I would strongly recommend that starting around 3:15 you log on every so often and make sure there are cars around so you can go to plan B if you need to.
What are the chances of a driver accepting the ride and then canceling before he gets to my location because some other more lucrative opportunity comes his way?
Very close to zero. The driver can't see where you're going until they arrive to pick you up, and a drive across the bay area (long distance) at freeway speed (relative short time) is about as good as they will get without surge. They get paid much more for miles driven than elapsed time.
Which of the two services is likely to be less expensive at that hour?
I've only used Uber in the bay area so I can't compare the two, but here they're pretty competitive (I took a ride yesterday outbound on Lyft and return home on Uber and they were within $3).
You can get a fare estimate right now if you want to check.
Uber:
1. Manually scroll the map so the pin is at your desired departure point.
2. You may get a message saying "Your pin is far from your GPS location. Please confirm"etc, etc. You can ignore this.
3. Tap "Fare estimate"
4. Manually type in your destination
Lyft:
1. Manually scroll the map so the pin is at your desired departure point.
2. Tap "Set Pickup"
3. Tap "Fare Estimate"
4. Type in destination