Lyft's new precise location feature takes the guesswork out of your ride

By Bruce Brown Published August 22, 2016

Now you can be even more exact when you arrange Lyft ride-hailing service pickups and drop-offs. After experimenting with a precise location selections app feature in March, Lyft will expand the service to 200 sites in the United States, with plans to add more places as time goes on, according to SlashGear.

The detailed location information applies to airports and arenas. The goal is to make it easier for riders to get picked up and dropped by communicating the precise details to the driver ahead of time. Both riders and drivers stand to benefit from the new feature, which should be a time-saver for each.

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Instead of indicating that you want to be dropped off at an airport, for example, when you book a ride to an airport where this feature is active, you could specify a specific terminal, and in some cases even the precise door, if you know it in advance. During the trip, you won’t have to interrupt a phone call to tell the driver, for example, and the driver won’t have to ask.

The process would work the same way for airport pickups, where in most cases after you retrieved your luggage you’d already know the precise terminal and door.

As with airports, so with arenas. Rather than have a Lyft driver waste time looking for you or calling or texting you while driving around a huge arena you could specify the entrance or pickup point from a menu of available locations in the app.

In the Lyft user blog, the company mentioned usage at Outside Lands, a three-day music and arts festival held each August at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. During the festival earlier this month, Lyft riders used precise pickup and drop-off points like Box Office, Main Gate, and South Entrance more than 3,000 times.

Lyft also mentioned that since the first locations were added to the company’s app in March, it has seen a 25 percent decrease in pre-ride calls and tests between riders and drivers.

Former Contributing Editor

Bruce Brown Contributing Editor As a Contributing Editor to the Auto teams at Digital Trends and TheManual.com, Bruce…

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