Undeterred by Uber, Lyft says it’s destined to be No. 1

Lyft has gained steadily on its rival over past year

SAN FRANCISCO – Jackie Wightman hops in her Lyft ride and starts to chat.

“My husband and I sold one of our cars because we now just use Lyft in the city,” says Wightman, in town from Denver, where she works in sales for consumer insights company InfoScout. “And we deleted the Uber app after we saw how they were treating women at that company.”

Her Lyft driver can’t help but smile. He happens to be company president John Zimmer, out for one of his occasional shifts behind the wheel to sound out riders and test driver app features.

“She’s not a plant, I swear,” Zimmer says with a laugh during an exclusive ride- along conversation with USATODAY. “But it has been an exciting year.”

Wightman’s flattering summary does neatly touch on a few big landmarks in what has been an explosive 12 months in the ride- hailing business.

Awareness of the taxi alternative has increased thanks in part to Lyft barreling into more than 100 new cities in 2017.

Lyft claims that its service is now available to 95% of the population, up from 54% at the beginning of the year. The company says it recently hit 500 million total rides — the last 100 million coming in just three months, or about 1 million a day — and its valuation has doubled in the past year to around $ 11 billion.

Yetmarket leader Uber also played a role in commanding consumer attention, grabbing headlines for ignoring complaints about sexual harassment at its headquarters aswell as for a variety of corporate practices that now has regulators investigating.

Despite those issues, Uber reported a 10% jump in second- quarter bookings over the previous quarter, according to Bloomberg, and last summer hit 5 billion rides spread out across more than 70 countries.

As private companies, neither Lyft nor Uber report operational details or revenue growth. But a variety of companies that track credit- card data suggest that over the past few years, Lyft has gained steadily on Uber. In data prepared for USA TODAY by TXN Solutions earlier this year, Uber’s market share had slipped to 75% from 90% since 2015.

Uber’s valuation also has slipped according to someindustrywatchers, from a high of nearly $ 70 billion to perhaps closer to $ 50 billion based on ongoing reports aboutSoftBank looking to take a huge stake in the ridehailing giant based on that lower valuation.

Zimmer won’t comment on such figures. But, he adds, “We feel that eventually we can be the biggest service in the U. S.”