He Found a Far-Flung Fix to L.A. Traffic Jams
Growing up in Los Angeles, Logan Green spent a lot of time stuck in traffic. When he started college at University of California, Santa Barbara, he left his car at home and started a ridesharing service on campus, one that had just six vehicles. Green was invited to join the board of the Santa Barbara Metropolitan Transit District while still in school, but he quickly grew disillusioned by the unsustainable economics of public transportation. Frustrated, he left for a trip to southern Africa. The rest is startup history, and a company that generated a reported $700 million in revenue in 2016. I WAS JUST HEADING into my senior year at college, in 2005, and my friend Matt Van Horn and I took a trip to Africa— Cape Town, Namibia, Botswana, and then Zimbabwe.
Throughout the trip, we saw these shared-ride vans. In Zimbabwe, they call them kombis, named after the VW van, though sometimes it’s a pickup truck or a minibus, whatever is available.
In L.A., roads are nonstop traffic and noise. In Zimbabwe, the streets were quiet. People walked, rode a bike, or took a kombi. I don’t think I saw a private vehicle the entire time I was there. No locals were driving themselves around.
I was blown away. Zimbabweans had created this incredibly scalable transportation system that got better the more people used it: the more kombis on the road, the faster the pickup times, the more destinations and routes that were covered. It operated on basic free-market principles. Entrepreneurs who would see a need for a route would charge market rates and fulfill that need.
It hit me then. Zimbabwe has solved this problem in a more elegant manner than we have in the U.S. This isn’t about money. Zimbabwe has nothing in terms of government support. The system was created out of necessity, and it’s because of the free-market principles that it’s been able to scale up so successfully.
I didn’t know how to translate that back to the U.S. It was about a year and half later that I started working on Zimride, which was named after that experience. Ultimately, Lyft evolved from Zimride.