Your Apps Can't Save You Now - Washington City Paper

BREAKING: It is probably going to snow quite a bit this weekend. Washingtonians with late-onset snow panic may be reaching to their beloved apps in the coming days to save them from snow-related lines at grocery stores or to rescue them when Metro inevitably leaves them stranded.

Car2Go will suspend service in D.C. and Arlington at 9 p.m. “indefinitely until the severity of the storm has passed,” it said in an email to customers Thursday afternoon. Uber will operate unless a travel ban is put in place. The company is already warning that demand may be high, which means surge pricing will be in effect. However, Uber’s surge pricing will be capped in D.C., Maryland, and Virginia, where states of emergency have been declared (D.C.’s snow emergency begins at 9:30 a.m. Friday); at how much, we don’t yet know (the company says it sets the price by “excluding the three highest-priced, non-emergency days of the preceding two months”). During a January 2015 snowstorm, Uber capped prices at 2.8 times the normal fare in New York and 2.9 times in Boston. Lyft will completely suspend its surge pricing in D.C. because of the state of emergency, a spokesperson says.

For those hoping to skip long grocery lines, delivery services may not be able to help until next week. A spokesperson for Instacart says it has no availability until Monday (although a few two-hour windows seem to be open today), while a spokesperson for Giant’s Peapod says it will suspend delivery on Saturday and Sunday. Peapod added additional delivery windows today, but they’re sold-out. Safeway’s delivery service similarly has no availability until Monday.

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