Lyft changes its app to promote bikes, scooters, and mass transportation


Lyft is a company that makes nearly all of its money by car trips. However, this app is not going to be limited only to do this anymore. This is because it is redesigning its app in the hope that people take lesser car trips — the new app, which is available in every city where Lyft functions.

What are the new updates all about?

It will make it simpler for customers to move back and forth in various modes of travel like scooters, bike-share, and car rentals. As of now, non-car choices like bike-share and transit appear at the bottom of a list of the nearby options on Lyft’s home screen. 

With this redesign, they will show different tabs at the bottom of the screen. Tapping each tab brings up another view of the map.

How will the update affect the user experience?

Lyft’s testing has proved that this new tab design significantly grows the usage of modes beyond rideshare. The company witnessed a nearly 50 percent increase in usage sessions of the transit tab. And Lyft is expecting to accelerate a trend it noticed over the summer, where one of those eight Lyft rides was a bike ride in the cities where those modes were available.

In the upcoming weeks, Lyft will offer a Mode Selector that lets customers compare prices and travel time. If a bike is more affordable and quicker than a car, then that will show at the top of the list. If transit is the fastest way to go, consumers will be able to see that, too.

The new app is a little over a year old since Lyft’s last redesign where the company said it desired to put carpooling and mass transit front and center. After a month, Lyft obtained the bike-share operator Motivate. This includes major systems like Citi Bike in New York City, Capital Bikeshare in Washington, DC, and Ford GoBike in San Francisco. This led to Lyft launching its own electric scooters in different cities.

Lyft VS. Uber

Both Lyft and its chief rival, Uber, are locked in an avid battle to become one-stop shops for all public transportation. And these days, their apps are nearly the same as each other. Depending on the city, both provide cars, carpooling, bikes, scooters, and public transit routes. Uber has started to offer the facility to purchase subway and bus tickets in a few cities. It attains to think that Lyft will ultimately do the same.

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