The other element of surge pricing is that it encourages reallocation of resources to the places where they provide the most value. I'm not sure how you could achieve that benefit with rationing.
It's true, rationing would struggle to maximize economic value by allocating to well-off hoarders and scalpers. But it also wouldn't properly incentivize consumption minimization, warehousing, and production, and that's the real rub. It's complicated. Just be careful about fudging "economic value = value," because this seemingly harmless approximation actually smuggles in an assumption on the scale of "free market can do no wrong."
No it isn't, nor was the parent necessarily restricting the scope to economics. Many animals such as beavers, bees, ants, dolphins, etc., have notions of value. Way before human society existed and likely will continue to have them long after.
There is a case to be made money is simpler. I'm not going to say I prefer sky faries to decide who gets AC and who doesn't. So, I suppose I'm just saying "value" here is a bit decoupled from "has money"
Cell service is private and there are certainly places, even places near major cities, that don’t have cell coverage. The western US is full of areas with no coverage whatsoever, even on highways.
There are plenty of utilities that aren’t universally available (water, sewer, phone, cable, Internet, etc.) and are, in fact, limited to populated areas.
You ever actually look at a cellular availability map?
https://fcc.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=...
The main element of surge pricing is that it's temporary, which means not-important-for-non-emergencies