A lot of people would honestly prefer to wait in a line (seems fair on the face of it, everyone treated the same, first-come-first-serve) then wait a less-transparent amount of time due to people willing to pay more to (effectively) jump them in line.
How do you think people would react to grocery stores saying "oh, the checkout lines are long right now, everyone gets hit with an extra 20%!" The underlying mechanics are different, but that's kinda the customer experience it gives off.
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.
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.
Peak and off-peak are quite easy to predict when it comes to electricity bills. Night is off-peak.
A better analogy would be cellphone roaming, if when you placed the call, you were told exactly how much more you were going to pay per minute. Roaming is (and long distance charges used to be) even worse than Uber's surge pricing because you only see the charge afterwards.
How do you think people would react to grocery stores saying "oh, the checkout lines are long right now, everyone gets hit with an extra 20%!" The underlying mechanics are different, but that's kinda the customer experience it gives off.