Transportation

Lyft Delivers Carbon-Neutral Rides

The ride-hailing company announced on Thursday that it plans to become one of the largest voluntary purchasers of carbon offsets in the world.
Lyft is going carbon-neutral, the company announced Thursday. Chris Helgren/Reuters

Over the years, John Zimmer, the co-founder and president of Lyft, has often pointed to a class he took as an undergraduate as the source of his ideas about environmental sustainability—and by extension, Lyft’s goals to create greener transportation options.

The class at Cornell University was called “Green Cities.” The professor, Robert Young, opened the first lecture by describing how roads and transit systems built decades ago weren’t designed to sustain the rapid growth of urban populations today, Zimmer recalled. “If we don’t fix the infrastructure problem, we’re going to have a major economic and environmental problem,” Zimmer told a roundtable of reporters in Washington, D.C., in late March.