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Two years ago, John Zimmer, co-founder and president of Lyft Inc., predicted that car ownership would be non-existent in major US cities by 2025. At seven, Lyft now offers to pay people in about three dozen cities for them to park their cars for a month, with compensation ranging from $ 500 to $ 600 in credits for its transportation service. There are also credits for ridesharing and car sharing services and public transit.
The move is a marketing maneuver. Lyft will choose about 2,000 people to participate and hope that they will be honest about not using their personal car. This program will only last one month, but it indicates a real change in the transportation industry. Lyft and Uber Technologies Inc. have spent the year adding new types of transportation to their platforms. They each bought a bike sharing company – Uber's choice was Jump; Lyft bought Motivate – and develops its own scooter sharing services. Lyft has also redesigned its application to highlight its carpooling service and public transport.
The belief behind these initiatives is that the future of mobile transportation companies will depend on becoming more generalized transportation providers. Last year's commitment to autonomous vehicles has been shifted, at least in the short term, by the excitement of less technological forms of personal transport.
Zimmer described the program, which the company dubbed "Ditch Your Car," as a way to familiarize people with alternatives to owning cars. "We have to provide a reliable service that rivals the idea that your car is parked in front of your house, which is extremely convenient," he said.
He said Lyft was not strong enough to do much more than survive for most of its history, but thinks it has taken a turn. The legal uncertainty surrounding horse riding in the United States has been more or less resolved. Lyft increased its market share to 29 percent from 16 percent at the beginning of last year, according to Second Measure, a credit card analysis company. Lyft said in June it raised $ 600 million in new funds. Bloomberg News recently reported that the company had begun preparations for its launch in 2019. According to Zimmer, the progress made in core business gives the company the freedom to expand. "We are finally at a point of stability where we can double those efforts," he said.
At the same time, the economic aspects of bunkering – which will be the bulk of Uber and Lyft's operations in the foreseeable future – are discouraging. No company is profitable, and the attrition of drivers and the costs of acquiring new riders are high. Bicycle and scooter sharing services connect with new customers. Since the vehicles are cheap and there is no driver to share the fare, they also have higher margins. Perhaps most importantly, a platform with multiple transportation options is more likely to present a viable alternative to owning private vehicles, which is a convenient but expensive way to get around. According to AAA, the average cost of a car and its driving of 15,000 miles per year is about $ 8,500.
Susan Shaheen, an assistant professor of transportation engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, said the carrier platforms probably could not be a credible alternative to owning a car in their current construction. People take Lyft or Uber at the airport or at home after a night out, but travel is less frequent. It makes sense for companies to embrace new forms of transportation, she said. "Does it shift them to something more sustainable in the business model? We do not know until such a platform is created, "she said.
If the idea of a sprawling transport platform is not new, the idea of paying people to break them is not new. In 2000, Sunil Paul, the founder of Sidecar, a passenger transport service now gone, filed a patent that offered a versatile platform. One aspect of his plan was to buy cars from people who wanted to use the system to get around, compensating them for credits they could use to get around. Carrier operators could then sell the vehicles to help fund its core operations. In 2009, Zipcar gave free membership to 300 people who pledged not to use their own cars for a month. Those who participated said they walked and cycled a lot more, and many said they would continue to live without their cars. (Lyft piloted his own Ditch Your Car program in Chicago earlier this year.)
Paul said Lyft and Uber will be able to beat the competition in bikes and scooters, like Lime and Bird startups. The existing user bases of passenger carriers are a bigger advantage than the small business benefits for motorcycles and scooters. But Paul says that new forms of transportation will be used primarily to direct people to the transportation service. "I think all this will take us back to the carpool part, because that's the common backbone," he said. Zimmer said Lyft needed to systematically train his customers to do things that they did not normally do. When the company was launched, there were major questions about whether a large number of people would be willing to embark on the personal cars of strangers they had found in a smartphone app. "At each stage, we thought about behavior change," he said. Zimmer argued that most people accept car ownership costs routinely. "It just became normal," he said. "We need to understand why there is an alternative."
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