Citing the law of supply and demand, Uber Technologies and Lyft warned commuters on Wednesday to anticipate more expensive rides for New Year's Eve as people go out to celebrate the change of year and millions would need a ride before and after the revelry.

The two transport companies made an email blast and communicated through its social media accounts to inform riders to expect more expensive rides during peak demand hours, especially between 1 and 4 a.m.

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Uber emailed its customers, quoted by Bloomberg, "Catch a ride right when the ball drops at midnight or wait a couple hours for prices to return to normal."

San Francisco-based Lyft blogged that to ensure it has enough drivers on the road, it placed a 400 percent prime time limit on fares for New Year's Eve, twice the usual 200 percent maximum on other busy days.

The first hours of January 1 is considered by the rideshare provider as the busiest night of the year when it expects to make 2 million rides. On a global scale, the rideshare providers are expected to earn US$100 million within 24 hours from the time that Auckland revelers end their New Year's Eve festivities and start to go home to the period when New Yorkers had their last wine and are ready to doze the early hours of the first day of the year.

In Chicago, where another rideshare provider Quxsi is based, co-founder Adam Janikis said the movement of passengers would start before 8 p.m. and demand for rides would further increase between 8 and 10 p.m. But the crazy hour would be after midnight that he didn't discount the possibility of service outage similar to what happened on Halloween.

Janikis foresees the highest surge in rideshare fares in the state, but people would have little choice except to agree to higher fares, pointing out, as quoted by Chicago Tribune, "Considering how could it is, nobody wants to stand out and street-hail a cab."

Uber was recently criticized for jackiing up prices during the Sydney Siege when a gunman took hostages of a coffee shop for 16 hours in the Australian city.

TagsUber, lyft, taxi service, new year's eve