Lyft lets riders add stops to a trip
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Reporting from San Francisco — In another move to encourage people to carpool, Lyft added a feature to its ride-hailing app Monday that will let passengers request a stop along the way to their final destination.
The feature, which will be tested with select Lyft users before a nationwide rollout, is the first of its kind on a major ride-hailing platform.
Previously, if two or more people wanted to share a ride with different drop-off locations, they’d have to tell the driver ahead of time or change the end destination once they got to their first stop. The new feature streamlines the process.
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A Lyft spokesman said about 5% of trips currently involve passengers manually updating the destination after the first drop off, which represents hundreds of thousands of rides each month.
The feature is available only with classic Lyft rides, Lyft Plus (which has larger vehicles) and Lyft Premier (which has high-end vehicles). It is not available on Lyft Line, in which the company’s algorithm creates carpools by matching passengers headed in the same direction.
Carpooling has long been a focus for the San Francisco company, which introduced fare-splitting and Driver Destination — in which a driver can choose to only pick up passengers while on-route to a destination — in 2014, and launched a commuter carpooling feature in the Bay Area earlier this year.
In Los Angeles, the company said weekly use of Lyft Line has increased 177% since the beginning of this year.
Lyft faces stiff competition from Uber, which has offered carpooling services such as UberPool.
Twitter: @traceylien
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UPDATES:
2:30 p.m.: This article was updated to additional contextual information.
This article was originally published at 10 a.m.
