Assuming around $1.3 billion cash on hand and success in capping the operating losses at $50 million per month they should be able to hang in there but Uber is serious about monopolizing the space.
Lyft's cofounder writing at Medium:
The Third Transportation Revolution
Introduction: A Country Built for CarsHT: The Verge
I remember when I first fell in love with cars. It started small with Hot Wheels when I was three and Micromachines when I was six. Everything about them was fast and exciting — even the commercials were narrated by the World’s Fastest Talker. I loved them.Then, when I turned 12, my dad and I began taking annual trips to see the real thing at the New York International Auto Show. I looked forward to going every year, because even at that young age, I felt a connection to cars and the freedom they represented.I think, in some ways, it was my love of cars that largely influenced how I saw the world. But it wasn’t until I took a life-changing city planning course in college that I had an epiphany: Cars weren’t just shaping my worldview; they were shaping the world, itself.In the class, we learned about the history of cities and the massive impact transportation had on their evolution — both on how they were built and how people lived in them. From then on, I couldn’t help thinking about the inextricable link between transportation and the design of the cities I was living in. And I started noticing a very basic problem everywhere, hiding in front of our eyes.Next time you walk outside, pay really close attention to the space around you.Next time you walk outside, pay really close attention to the space around you. Look at how much land is devoted to cars — and nothing else. How much space parked cars take up lining both sides of the street, and how much of our cities go unused covered by parking lots.It becomes obvious, we’ve built our communities entirely around cars. And for the most part, we’ve built them for cars that aren’t even moving. The average vehicle is used only 4% of the time and parked the other 96%.Most of us have grown up in cities built around the automobile, but imagine for a minute, what our world could look like if we found a way to take most of these cars off the road. It would be a world with less traffic and less pollution. A world where we need less parking — where streets can be narrowed and sidewalks widened. It’s a world where we can construct new housing and small businesses on parking lots across the country — or turn them into green spaces and parks. That’s a world built around people, not cars.All of this is possible. In fact, as we continue into our new century, I believe we’re on the cusp of nothing short of a transportation revolution — one that will shape the future of our communities. And it is within our collective responsibility to ensure this is done in a way that improves quality of life for everyone. The coming revolution will be defined by three key shifts:1. Autonomous vehicle fleets will quickly become widespread and will account for the majority of Lyft rides within 5 years.Last January, Lyft announced a partnership with General Motors to launch an on-demand network of autonomous vehicles. If you live in San Francisco or Phoenix, you may have seen these cars on the road, and within five years a fully autonomous fleet of cars will provide the majority of Lyft rides across the country.Tesla CEO Elon Musk believes the transition to autonomous vehicles will happen through a network of autonomous car owners renting their vehicles to others. Elon is right that a network of vehicles is critical, but the transition to an autonomous future will not occur primarily through individually owned cars. It will be both more practical and appealing to access autonomous vehicles when they are part of Lyft’s networked fleet.Why? For starters, our fleet will provide significantly more consistency and availability than a patchwork of privately owned cars. That kind of program will have a hard time scaling because individual car owners won’t want to rent their cars to strangers. And most importantly, passengers expect clean and well-maintained vehicles, which can be best achieved through Lyft’s fleet operations. Today, our business is dependent on being experts at maximizing utilization and managing peak hours, which allow us to provide the most affordable rides. This core competency translates when we move to an autonomous network. In other words, Lyft will provide a better value and a superior experience to customers.I’ll have more to say on how the autonomous network will work a bit later in this piece.2. By 2025, private car ownership will all-but end in major U.S. cities.As a country, we’ve long celebrated cars as symbols of freedom and identity. But for many people — especially millennials — this doesn’t ring true. We see car ownership as a burden that is costing the average American $9,000 every year. The car has actually become more like a $9,000 ball and chain that gets dragged through our daily life. Owning a car means monthly car payments, searching for parking, buying fuel, and dealing with repairs....MUCH MORE
