Well, that was a weekend. If you're anywhere on the East Coast you already know what I'm talking about - the storm everyone started calling Jonas dumped snow on us from Friday night straight through Saturday, and by the time it stopped New York was sitting somewhere close to 27 inches in Central Park, which puts it right up near the top of the list for biggest snowstorms the city's ever recorded. DC shut its roads down entirely. Baltimore too. My own street didn't get plowed until Sunday afternoon, and I spent a good chunk of Saturday just standing at the window watching a stop sign slowly disappear.
I want to talk about something smaller than the storm itself though, because every outlet on the internet is going to spend this week writing "the blizzard of 2016" recap posts with drone footage and reporter-standing-in-snow videos, and I don't have anything to add to that. What I do want to talk about is what happened on Uber the second the snow started really coming down.
By Saturday afternoon my Twitter feed was full of screenshots - people in Manhattan and Brooklyn posting fare estimates with surge multipliers sitting at 6x, 8x, one guy claimed he saw 9x for a ride that would normally run him twelve bucks. Suddenly it was pushing past a hundred dollars for a few miles. And look, I get the economics of it. Fewer drivers willing to go out in a blizzard means less supply, more people trying to get somewhere means more demand, the algorithm does its thing. That's the whole pitch of surge pricing and on a random rainy Tuesday I actually don't mind it.
But a declared state of emergency is a different situation than a rainy Tuesday, and I think Uber knows that, which is why they've capped surge before during bad storms and got some decent press for it, and then apparently didn't bother this time, or at least not everywhere. The part that actually bothers me isn't even the price gouging angle that's been argued to death since 2014. It's that surge pricing during something like this doesn't just inconvenience the rider. It puts a driver on the road who might otherwise have stayed home, because now there's real money on the table. I've got a friend who drives for Uber part time and he told me flat out that the surge is exactly why he went out Saturday when he had zero good reason to be driving in that mess. That's not a hypothetical, that's a guy I actually know making a decision because of a number on his phone.
Meanwhile my own weekend was a lot less eventful, which I'm grateful for. Power flickered twice but never went out. My internet held up fine, no complaints there, though I will say the grocery store two blocks from me looked like a crime scene by Friday evening - every loaf of bread gone, milk gone, and for some reason the entire shelf of canned chili wiped out too. I don't know what the canned chili people know that the rest of us don't but I respect the commitment.
I've been writing this blog since November of 2011 now, five winters worth of storms at this point if you count the smaller ones, and every single time one of these hits I tell myself I'm going to use the downtime to catch up on writing, and every single time I instead spend six hours reorganizing my bookmarks folder and watching whatever's queued up on Netflix. This time was no different. I didn't touch the drafts sitting in my folder. I did watch most of a documentary about competitive Scrabble that I've already half forgotten the details of.
Anyway. If you're digging out today, good luck with it, and if you ordered an Uber this weekend I hope it was worth whatever it ended up costing you.