LyftLine makes ridesharing even faster with new "Re-Route" feature
Lyft has quietly added a new feature to its carpooling service Lyft Line. Called Express Re-route, it allows LyftLine to reassign riders to a driver with a passenger whose route more closely aligns with theirs, even after they have already accepted another ride. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s essentially keeping passengers in the matching pool up until they hop in their ride, and putting that ETA time to optimal use to deliver the greatest efficiency to passengers,&rdquo; said Katie Dally, a Lyft spokesperson. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s more complex technically, as looking at already-matched passengers increases the match pool by a large factor, thereby increasing the number of possible ride permutations that are compared algorithmically.&rdquo;
Your Lyft Line ride might be a tad faster — or so Lyft hopes — thanks to a new feature the company quietly rolled out a few weeks ago.

The new feature is called Express Re-route, and it's intended to find passengers a better match than the one they were originally given. If you've requested a Lyft Line — but haven't yet been picked up — and the algorithm working behind the scenes finds another passenger whose route is more in line with yours, your route will be changed in favor of the better option.

According to company spokesperson Katie Dally, the amount of time it takes a driver to get to the passenger after the re-routing will remain roughly the same —"so someone who says, 'Oh, I have five minutes before my Lyft Line arrives, let me get ready' and we suddenly switch you doesn't then look at the app and see it changes to one minute." But, she added, because the routes will be more efficient, riders will spend less time in the car.

Essentially, Lyft is allowing the algorithm that works to match one passenger to another — which usually stops looking as soon as a match is found — to run for longer. This is an engineering challenge for Lyft in that it dramatically increases the number of possible ride permutations, but Dally said the company believes that it'll be a boon for speed and efficiency.