SAN FRANCISCO — The other morning, Uber wanted $77 to get me across San Francisco during rush hour. Lyft wanted $49. Same route, same moment.
It wasn’t a fluke — it’s how ride-share pricing works. The apps often quote wildly different prices for the exact same ride, sometimes even for two people standing next to each other.
If you’re not comparing Uber and Lyft before you book, you’re probably leaving hundreds of dollars a year on the table.
It’s more than a theory. Across four days, my colleague Andrea and I tested prices on 80 different routes around San Francisco. Using both test and personal accounts, we entered the same start and end points into Uber and Lyft within moments of each other.
Their base fares differed by 14 percent on our test accounts — a gap of $4.15 per trip.
The thing is, neither app was consistently cheaper. They flip-flopped. So you really do have to check both.
What if our test rides aren’t like yours? Economists studying ride-share pricing have come to remarkably similar results. Earlier this year, researchers at Johns Hopkins and Harvard ran a much larger and more controlled pricing experiment in New York City. They simulated 2,238 trip requests on Uber and Lyft based on data collected by the city about the real trips New Yorkers take.
And just like me, they found Uber and Lyft prices differed by about 14 percent. In three out of four rides, the difference was more than a dollar. The longer the trip, the greater the price difference grew.
You might think the cheaper app makes you wait longer. Not according to their data: higher prices didn’t come with shorter waits.
Uber said the 14 percent difference isn’t intentional. “Uber and Lyft calculate fares independently,” said Uber’s head of product policy, Harry Hartfield. “These variations aren’t coordinated,” he said.
The economists think more price comparison would actually help everyone. “What would force Uber and Lyft to really have competitive pricing?” said Michael Luca, a Johns Hopkins economist who co-led the study. “It’s the fear of price comparison that’s going to drive it.”
During my testing, I used both a fresh phone with new Uber and Lyft accounts and my own phone with my long-standing personal accounts. For 40 trips, I entered identical start and end points into both phones at the exact same moment.
The result was startling. The base fares varied — Uber's by 11 percent on average, Lyft's by 13 percent. One time, Uber wanted to charge my personal account $17 more than the test account for the same airport trip.
There are lots of theories about what triggers some people to get charged more — low phone battery, gift cards or even certain credit cards.
Both Uber and Lyft tell me the answer to all of those theories is no. They also say they don’t know if you have the rival app installed, so switching back and forth to compare prices shouldn’t impact the price of your trip.
The companies say their base prices aren’t personalized, and they’d expect for there to be some variation. Those rates are calculated dynamically based on location, demand, estimated time and distance, traffic, and driver availability — all of which can rapidly fluctuate.