Lyft Line’s Express Re-Route Feature Aims To Get You Where You’re Going Faster

Lyft has quietly added a new feature to Lyft Line, its service that lets passengers share rides with other people heading their same direction for a lower price, called Express Re-route. With this new feature, which officially rolled out exactly one week ago, Lyft Line may reassign you to a driver with a passenger whose route more closely aligns with yours.

“It’s essentially keeping passengers in the matching pool up until they hop in their ride, and putting that ETA time to optimal use to deliver the greatest efficiency to passengers,” Katie Dally, a Lyft spokesperson, told TechCrunch. “It’s more complex technically, as looking at already-matched passengers increases the match pool by a large factor, thereby increasing the number of possible ride permutations that are compared algorithmically.”

Ultimately, Lyft’s goal is to make the passenger experience better and more efficient by reducing the number of detours, which is a smart move given that Lyft is in an ongoing battle with Uber to be the best ride-hailing service.

Here’s an example of the text message Lyft sends to passengers to notify them of the re-route:

https://twitter.com/torjo87/status/637304483001733120/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

All that being said, passengers may not get re-routed too often “due to strong routes and matches that exist throughout the Lyft platform,” Dally said, but express re-routing will always be working behind the scenes to make sure passengers get the most optimal matches.

Have you experienced Lyft’s new Express Re-route? If so, I want to hear about it.