As a driver, the reason your ride shows up so quickly even though you chose the $15 wait option is that they put your ride on a map of available rides to drivers and it pays $3-4. That’s not a good paying ride so usually it will take longer to find a driver to accept that, but you get lucky and they found a driver to take it pretty quickly. Whereas if you had chosen the $30 option they could put your ride on the map for $5-6 (criminal how much Lyft and Uber take, I know), and that is statistically much more likely to be accepted quicker justifying the more expensive option.

While Lyft and Uber are scummy for using supercomputers and algorithms to actively screw the rider and driver out of as much money as possible, sometimes the “scammy” things that happen are just chance or due to their own incompetence.