Uber Hiked Taxi Fares During Terrorist Attack in London | Hacker News Reader

Uber Hiked Taxi Fares During Terrorist Attack in London

sputniknews.com

3 pointsznpy6 comments

Can someone who thinks Uber's pricing is unethical or bad please explain their reasoning?

Why would the scenario without surge pricing be preferable to you?

The result without surge pricing would be a much longer queue. Queues typically lead to a poor allocation of resources. Surge pricing causes people with other transportation options, or less need, to seek alternatives. People with acute transportation needs are then more likely to get rides.

I don't think it's unethical, but that's because I understand surge pricing is a tactic to increase the number of drivers on the road. Most people don't get that. And as much as we want to blame people for not understanding how things work, the onus is on Uber to communicate these things clearly.

I do think it's not just bad PR, but it wastes an opportunity for great PR. The other black car service capitalized on the opportunity to help. Had Uber recognized this and put surge pricing into effect for drivers but subsidized riders they would have gained a lot of good will. But they didn't and they have to continue to fight the negativity.

Uber did stabilize prices and refunded those that were charged surge prices. These outraged customers are just those that were charged surge automatically before surge was turned off and the money was refunded. This happens every time with terrorist attacks. This is just another example of a journalist bottom feeding for ad impressions.

It's unfortunate Uber doesn't have someone who monitors all sudden rate hikes like these, and maybe has a throttle switch to interject some oversight into an automated system.

Serious question: how do you automatically know that increased demand is from a terrorist attack versus some other legitimate source of surging like the emptying of some venue or unexpected precipitation?

The best I can think of is geotagged tweets. This events are also infrequent and different enough that I'm not certain how easy it would be to train a model to detect a terrorist attack. Human monitors would probably have to analyze tweets and determine what's happening and turn surge off after the fact.

Even then the right solution would be to leave surge on so that that part of the city lights up on the driver app and attracts more drivers to that part of the city, and then you refund customers the surge price exactly as uber has done during every single terrorist event that I've observed.

This is just some journalist published yet another unwarranted outrage piece against the company for the clicks. The unethical company here is the daily mail taking advantage of Uber and a terrorist attack to generate ad impressions.

Google news search for terrorist attack, maybe combined with Twitter for the geolocation? Or perhaps more realistically alert a human to decide whether to cancel surge pricing?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com