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Lyft Ride Sharing Service Set to Launch in New York on July 11

Lyft Ride-Sharing Service Set to Launch in New York on July 11

By Robin Sinha | Updated: 9 July 2014 19:18 IST

Lyft is now planning to enter the busy streets of New York after aggressively expanding its service in most of the parts in the US. Lyft is a privately-held donation based firm from San Francisco that facilitates peer-to-peer ridesharing via a mobile application. The users can download the Lyft app, and can request for a ridesharing vehicle from registered Lyft drivers (or rather, users), and pay them a fare that Lyft earns a commission over.

The San Francisco-based firm will make its service available starting Friday 11 July in the Brooklyn and the Queens areas, or the outer boroughs of New York City, according to a post on the company's blog.

John Zimmer, Lyft's co-founder, said in an interview to the New York Times, that the outer boroughs "are the areas that are most underserved by public transportation. There's a huge need to unlock the city for people who want to access it at a lower price point."

The Lyft blog added it has received a strong demand of both drivers and users in the New York region, and said more than 75,000 people have already opened the app to get a ride. Zimmer said that starting the service in New York is "something we wanted to do for a long time, especially in the outer boroughs, building into a vision of creating a personal transit network at the lowest possible cost." Notably, New York will be the 68th city Lyft will operate. In fact, just one of New York's 23 subway lines passes solely between boroughs, and 95% of taxi pickups happen in Manhattan or a local airport.

Uber has been considered as one of the arch rivals of the Lyft taxi service. NYT notes that in order to divert the user's attention from Lyft, Uber on Tuesday temporarily cut its UberX prices by 20 percent in New York.

However, to rope in more users, Lyft says it offering its service in the New York City free of charge for roughly two weeks - what this means is, it is waiving off the 20 percent commission on the fare/tip given to drivers. The firm already has 500 drivers ready for the service when the service starts.

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