In August 2023, when Waymo first launched its self-driving vehicles in San Francisco, the market shares of Uber and Lyft were 66% and 34%, respectively.

By the end of last year, these market shares had dropped to 55% and 22%, respectively, with Waymo on equal footing with Lyft. (These numbers specifically refer to rides that start and end within the boundaries of where Waymo operates and do not, for example, include rides to the airport.)

So the result was low double-digit losses in market share for both companies. This is not all that surprising given that autonomous vehicles are a novel thing and that Waymo's cars seem to be nicer than most Ubers and Lyfts. But it also shows that there maybe isn't a great deal of customer loyalty between the various platforms, that is, as long as the wait times are reasonable.

I think the more difficult questions remain: What does the ride-hailing space look like as AVs become more ubiquitous across our cities? Who is going to own what? And will individual car ownership fall?

We've spoken before about the peak load problem that Waymo faces as a result of owning its own cars. It's expensive to manage a fleet like this, especially relative to Uber's variable supply model. So one scenario remains a close partnership between Waymo and Uber, where Uber handles any above-base spikes in demand with actual humans.

But another scenario might be a hybrid approach where some of the AVs are owned by a ride-hailing company and some are owned by individuals who just contribute them to the network when they don't need them. This is what Tesla has been promising and, who knows, maybe it'll actually happen someday. Reilly Brennan recently wrote about this over here.

Personally, I would love to not own a car. It's also hard to imagine being able to make much money off a car that only goes to work during peak times, when the other robots are too busy. So I'm not convinced of this model. But I can see why Waymo is gaining market share. Privacy and a nicer cleaner vehicle are desirable features.

So apparently Lyft is the largest bikeshare operator in North America. They operate around 68,000 bikes and scooters, which equaled some 52 million rides last year. Ridership also continues to grow. Since 2020, ridership has grown in cities like New York (+56%), Chicago (+79%), Boston (82%), and Denver (+170%).

However, this part of Lyft's business was in the news this week because the company announced that they are entertaining proposals to sell it, as well as "strategic partnerships." The company has said that it remains committed to offering bikes through the Lyft app, but clearly it is trying to shore up its balance sheet.

This raises some interesting questions. Can bikeshare be a profitable and sustainable for-profit business? Or do we now need to be thinking of it as an important public service that is deserving of subsidies -- similar to how public transit and cars/roads work in most cities? My own view is that these networks are here to stay regardless of how profitable or unprofitable they might be.

For additional stats on Lyft's bikeshare business, click here. One of the figures that I found interesting, but not surprising, was that 71% of riders use bikeshare for "fun." This is by far the most popular use case. The next most popular use is "errands" at 39%.