[BurningFrog]

That is quite similar to "wait until the surge is over".

Without surge pricing, the Uber/Lyft model doesn't really work. It's mainly needed to bring out enough drivers to drive all riders. Without it, people can easily have to wait hours, and the service becomes useless.

I agree that the customer experience feels arbitrary and predatory. In part because people don't have any intuitive sense for dynamic pricing. And in part because we don't trust Uber/Lyft.

If/when they figure out a way to communicate or implement this better could be a game changer.

[majormajor]

Around the messaging, to pull in idea from 'autokad's post, maybe just explicitly different peak/off-peak rates being advertised (like with energy) would make a big difference in feel.

Their experiments in not even mentioning it's in surge seem like an improvement themselves—I don't want to know that I could be paying a lot less—some higher level of predictability to make it feel like a mature market/commodity could close the gap even more.