For the 200,000 attendees of San Francisco's Outside Lands Music Festival this past weekend, where a three-day pass cost $275, Uber's hated "surge pricing" scheme made sure that exhausted revelers ponied up hundreds of dollars to get a few miles across town.

Uber has a habit of gouging their customers when they need it the most. They famously pulled their "surge pricing" trick during a blizzard that crippled New York last December, sticking riders with bills 7.75 times the normal rate.

By comparison, Uber's 5x rides in San Francisco were a bargain. But one passenger tells us that drivers were taking particularly long routes while under surge pricing—ostensibly to avoid the traffic leaving the festival.

For example, Alex's driver made a four mile trip into an 11 mile ordeal, racking up $391 in charges in the process:

Fortunately, there was a way to avoid the high cost of disruption:

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Photos: Miles Suter, Kezar Söze