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Lesson 14 of 15

44. Design Ride-Hailing with Surge Pricing (Uber / Rapido)

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The interview prompt
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44.1 What do you ask first?
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44.2 How big is this, really?
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44.3 What are the doors?
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44.4 What do we store?
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44.5 What does the whole system look like?
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44.6 How are location updates handled?
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44.7 How does matching work?
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44.8 How does surge pricing work?
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44.9 How does the trip state machine work?
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44.10 What would you say in the last five minutes?
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Score yourself
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Variations to practise
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Sources
15
Code lab
44. Design Ride-Hailing with Surge Pricing (Uber / Rapido)

Sources

3 min read+10 XP

Source notes

  • Geospatial cells, H3 and driver indexes: see Chapter 18 and its source notes (Uber's H3).
  • Atomic assignment and idempotent events: Chapters 17 and 24. Real-time connections: Chapter 21.
  • Driver counts, ride volumes, update intervals, speeds, fare constants and surge formula are interview assumptions agreed in Step 1, not any company's real pricing. Arithmetic computed 2026-10-08.
  • Driver index with stale expiry, ETA vs straight-line ranking, atomic dispatch, smoothed and capped surge, idempotent trip states and fares: tested 2026-10-08 (code/ch44_ride_hailing.py, all checks pass).