Lyft partners with Budweiser to reduce drink-driving with free rides
Lyft has teamed up with Budweiser beer's parent company, Anheuser-Busch to try to stop people from drink-driving by giving out 5,000 $10 ride vouchers per week in multiple cities in the US through to the end of the year. The campaign starts today and is planned to coincide with the Christmas period, resulting in the distribution of around 80,000 vouchers in total. However, it should be noted that the vouchers will cover rides from Thursday to Sunday, only be available to users over 21, and will need to be claimed in advance, making them unavailable as a late-night, last-minute solution.  

Lyft and Anheuser-Busch will offer free rides through the end of 2016 in a campaign against drunk driving.

Lyft and Anheuser-Busch will offer free rides through the end of 2016 in a campaign against drunk driving. Credit: roberto machado noa/LightRocket via Getty Images

Lyft and Anheuser-Busch want to give people rides to stop drunk driving.

The two companies are partnering to give out 5,000 $10 ride vouchers per week from this Friday through the end of 2016. The campaign, planned to coincide with the holiday season, will distribute 80,000 ride vouchers total.

The vouchers will become available on Thursdays and expire at the end of the weekend in an effort to provide people with an alternative to taking their car for a night out.

The rides, available in cities throughout New York, Illinois, Colorado and Florida, are only available to people over 21 years old. Customers have to claim them in advance through Budweiser's and Lyft's Facebook and Twitter pages, so they won't be a last-minute late-night solution.

A Lyft/Budweiser vehicle for the companies' new campaign. Credit: ben hider for anheuser-busch

"It encourages planning ahead," said Katja Zastrow, vice president for corporate social responsibility at Anheuser-Busch. "This is an opportunity for people to make really positive choices."

The companies are distributing their first rides on Friday to coincide with Anheuser-Busch's Global Beer Responsible Day. It also ties into a marketing campaign, "Give a damn, don't drive drunk," from Anheuser-Busch flagship brand Budweiser.

For the campaign, Budweiser is buying 16 weeks of advertising targeting 21- to 34-year-olds.

Ride-hailing companies have tried to bring attention to drunk driving before. In 2015, Uber released a report(opens in a new tab) with Mothers Against Drunk Driving in which 78 percent of survey respondents said that "friends are less likely to drive drunk since the arrival of ride-sharing services like Uber to their city."

Uber also ran a short-term promotion to donate $1 to MADD for every ride taken.

But a study(opens in a new tab) from the University of California and Oxford University found that ride-sharing services actually didn't reduce drunk driving deaths.

Lyft says it has also partnered with MADD in the past. One of the company's early use cases centered on a night out, Lyft Vice President of Partnerships Oliver Hsiang told Mashable.

"Drunk driving is a really important issue for us. We think that Lyft is also a solution to this," Hsiang said.

The Budweiser partnership is one of Lyft's biggest, Hsiang said.

Lyft and Budweiser partnered earlier this year to offer rides at SXSW in Austin and Budweiser's Made in America in Philadelphia.