Lyft’s Commitment to Sharing the Road
At Lyft, our goal has always been to make every ride safe, comfortable, and reliable. Now, as we become a truly multimodal network that includes bikes and scooters, we are in a unique position to influence safety on our streets. We see an opportunity to make our roads safer through encouraging safer behavior by everyone who gets around using Lyft — our drivers, passengers and bike and scooter riders.
As part of our commitment, we are announcing new features to help keep streets safe, as we work together to share the road:
Preventing Doorings
As any rider knows, biking on crowded city streets can be a scary experience. Too many of our streets are designed for cars and lack protected bike lanes, which makes dooring (when a car door is opened into the path of a cyclist) a too-real possibility.
Enter the Dutch Reach. It’s a simple maneuver that helps prevent accidents. By changing how you open the car door, you could save a cyclist’s life. Before exiting your ride, reach across your body for the far door handle with your opposite hand. Check for bikes and scooters and then slowly open the door.
We’ll be sending in-app notifications to riders and drivers to remind them to do the Dutch Reach, and of course we’re also sharing the news with drivers in our Driver Hub.
To educate both our riders and drivers about how to keep cyclists and scooter riders safe, we’re distributing window decals reminding everyone to look out for bikes and scooters.
Drivers can pick up these decals at our Driver Hubs and apply them to their passenger windows.
Look for our new decals in cars, and start practicing your Dutch Reach today!
Geofencing
Last year, Lyft piloted a program on San Francisco’s busy Valencia Street aimed at addressing safety concerns. With significant commercial vehicles, public transit, private and ridesharing vehicles, pedestrians, and cyclists, Valencia Street had seen increased traffic, double parking — and high rates of collisions. We created a geofence to move all
Lyft pickups to safer locations on side streets, keeping Valencia Street clearer, facilitating smoother traffic, and making of the city’s busiest streets safer for everyone.
We are working to expand this successful pilot program to other cities beyond San Francisco, and we’ll have more news to share soon.
Together, the Lyft community has made huge strides in creating the world that we want to live in: one that is more sustainable and one that is designed for people, not cars. We see an opportunity to lead a culture shift on our roads, and we’ll keep innovating and working to build more features and develop more policies that keep our streets safe.
