Lyft's carpool option is really popular in these 5 cities
Lyft Line, the ride-hailing app's carpool option, debuted nearly four years ago, but just this week, the shared ride mode expanded to the company's first international city.
Toronto is the first city outside the U.S. to offer an Lyft Line, bringing the total number of cities with the option to 19. With the international expansion, Lyft shared some of its Line data and how the service is used across the U.S.
Most Line users are in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and Miami, and throughout the country Line was used almost 100 million times in 2017. Line adds up to about a quarter of all trips on the Lyft platform.
People are very willing to share a ride with strangers for that discounted ride (it's about 60 percent cheaper per ride than a regular Lyft pick-up) -- especially on Friday and Saturday evenings when the option is most popular, according to Lyft.
In the five top Line cities, Lyft calculates 16 million gallons of gas saved and 413 miles of saved travel.
Meanwhile Lyft competitor Uber has been expanding its carpool option, Uber Pool, far and wide. Torontonians will be familiar with how the Lyft option works as Uber's offered the service there for years. Uber Pool's most recent international expansion hit Australia this week.
Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.
