Lyft now letting you subscribe for a ride

Would you prefer paying a few hundred dollars a month for access to rides from a car-sharing service over a car payment?

That’s what Lyft wants to find out. The main competitor to Uber launched a new subscription service nationwide Tuesday that lets you get 30 rides for $299 a month.

The subscription also gives you a discount after those 30 “free” rides. (Those 30 rides are credits up to $15 each. If your fare goes over that, you pay the difference.) It’s about a $450 value.

We checked and found that you could get from the KRDO station on 8th Street to Briargate or the intersection of Austin Bluffs and Academy for a $15 fare. But if you commute every day, you’ll probably burn through those 30 rides fast.

We figure this is probably best for people who live central to the city and don’t have to commute often. If you take this option over buying a car, you’ll also save money on insurance, and downtown dwellers won’t have to worry about parking. But at the same time, you lose the ability to just grab the keys and go.

Lyft’s endgame is a page out of a socialistic society in a science-fiction novel. Lyft is betting big on self-driving cars, and the company aims at getting people on a subscription model that uses a fleet of autonomous vehicles in the future. We’ll see if people are that quick to give up their own wheels.