Lyft

These are my observations based on doing this off and on since 2018. YMMV. — What is rideshare? Rideshare is the matching of riders needing to go somewhere with drivers willing to take them there. What motivates the participants of rideshare? Riders need someone else to safely transport them. They may not have a Driver’s License, vehicle, or may be impaired in some way. …

Nobody likes to think too hard about Uber and Lyft. But a moment of extra thought might just save you a few bucks. They’re the guilty pleasures — luxuries, in some cases — that we indulge in to make life easier. ‘Transport Network Companies’ (TNCs) take the awkwardness and, in…

Is anything going to change? Probably not. — My flight to Denver landed later than expected, nearly 10:00pm last night. I was tired because it’s an hour later in Chicago. It was a fifteen-minute wait for a rideshare. I sat in someone’s abandoned wheelchair watching a sudden rainfall (luckily, DIA’s pick up area is covered). …

How we designed Lyft Live Activities to elevate the rider experience — A game changer for rideshare Of all the things we do at Lyft, choreographing pickups between riders & drivers is one of the most complex and consequential. Nailing this choreography depends on Lyft doing a lot of things well but simply keeping riders up to speed is essential. Failing to deliver the right information, at…

Our Lyft driver was a Chicago Dad. Or, more accurately, a Chicago suburbs dad, complete with Cubs jacket, Chicago accent, and stories about his older son’s batting coach. It was the saddest Lyft ride we’d had in a while. Chicago Dad also had an ex-wife, and a small apartment where…

Building ML Models with Observability at Scale — By Rajeev Prabhakar, Han Wang, Anindya Saha In our previous blog we discussed the different challenges we faced for model monitoring and our strategy for addressing some of these problems. We briefly mentioned using z-scores to identify anomalies. …

(Lyft / Easy Product question): Currently, the Lyft app shows users the estimated time for a ride to arrive as a number of minutes (e.g. 5 minutes). The management plans to change how this estimation is shown and use a range instead (e.g. 3–5 minutes). The hypothesis is that the…

One year of driving people around the Wasatch Front has come and gone. Let’s break this all down and see how I did. Per Mile The year 2022 had a lovely little spike in gas prices during the summer. For the entire year, I averaged a little over $4.00 per gallon of…

Recommendation plays an important role in Lyft’s understanding of its riders and allows for customizing app experiences to better fulfill their needs. At times, recommendations are also leveraged to manage the marketplace, making sure there’s a healthy balance between ride demand and driver supply. This allows ride requests to be…