Luxury Travel Seeks Sustainability

Lyft’s co-founders Logan Green and John Zimmer — two entrepreneurs with environmental-leaning and transportation-planning(ish) backgrounds — finally “made it” in the Silicon Valley sense.  On Friday, the ride-hailing company filed an S-1, indicating that it plans to go public soon. This particular document is often times the first glimpse at a private company’s financials and overall plans, and Lyft’s S-1 doesn’t disappoint.  The main thing that the S-1 reveals to me is the yawning gap between the founders’ vision of Lyft as a sustainable transportation company and the reality that Lyft faces in operating a ride-hailing company that relies on individual gas-powered vehicles in an ultra-competitive market.  Lyft’s founders write: “It’s time to redesign our cities around people, not cars.”