How much is your time worth?
Would you be willing to wait an extra five or 10 minutes for a Lyft car to pick you up if you could save $3 to $8 on your fare?
Lyft, which paused its ride carpool program that bunched up riders to save on fares, due to COVID-19, announced a new program Tuesday, "Wait & Save."
In the program, "riders can opt for a longer wait time but pay a lower fare than for a Standard ride, while drivers earn the same as they do for a Standard ride," Lyft says.
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What the company wouldn't answer were the two most obvious questions: How much will I save, and how much longer will it take for the car to arrive? A few minutes? An hour? A day?
Lyft spokesman Zachary Kizer declined all, saying the prices and times varied by market and time of day.
So we gave it a test ride in our Lyft app, typing in popular locations like the Los Angeles airport (3 miles from our home) and farther away places like the Hollywood Walk of Fame (25 miles), Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills (18 miles), the Santa Monica Pier (17 miles) and the San Pedro, California, boat terminal (17 miles).
The airport savings was $3, with $8 off the ride to Hollywood, $6 less for the rides to the Pier and Rodeo Drive, and $4 discount off driving to the boat terminal.
The average longer wait for the driver to arrive was six minutes, but then we didn't test during peak times, but instead on a Tuesday morning.
On the blog post, Lyft says that riders who choose Wait & Save "will always pay less than they would for a standard Lyft ride, and typically the longer they need to wait, the more they will save. This allows for the rider to be matched with the best-located driver."
Lyft says the program is rolling out and should be in 90 cities within the week. However, that's just a fraction of the 644 cities Lyft operates in, in the United States and Canada.
Rival Uber also temporarily closed its shared-ride program, and a spot check of the app Tuesday shows no replacement for it with something like "Wait & Save."
Since the COVID crisis, Lyft says rides to and from essential locations like supermarkets, convenience stores, police stations, drugstores, pharmacies, laundromats and banks have increased over 100%.
Follow USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham (@jeffersongraham) on Twitter
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